However, I’m not convinced Brezny himself actually does treat it that shallowly. I clicked through to the interview and read the whole thing, and given that context, as well as what I’ve read of his elsewhere, I don’t think he was saying that talking about unpleasant realities or “dark visions” was bad in itself, but that it can become destructive when it’s the only thing you talk about, or the predominant thing. If you look at the paragraph right after that one in the interview, he says:

“I don’t know what the exact percentage is, but if you read the newspaper today, you would probably find that the proportion of bad news to good news is maybe 85 to 15 percent, or something like, and that’s not an accurate representation of reality. I say let’s get that at least up to 50/50.”

Even in the bit you quoted, he says that it’s a problem when “the storytellers of our culture are constantly telling us that the only true thing is an ugly thing” – i.e. that it’s the negative being presented as if it’s all there is that’s the problem, not just having it presented at all.

So it seems to me that he’s not saying that people shouldn’t write or talk about bad things, but that there needs to be some balance – which I’d agree with.

And I say that as someone who’s had a record a band I was in in the 80s refused by the pressing plant for being offensive, and later been told that fiction I’ve written gave people nightmares.

Personally, I think the strongest and most enduring stories are ones that mix the positive and the negative – that make you confront dark and painful things but bring you through it in the end. At risk of sounding like a complete geek, it’s kind of like what Sam says to Frodo in The Lord of the Rings:

“It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end… because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing… this shadow. Even darkness must pass.”