Planning a Brave New World

Akira Toriyama, of Dragon Ball and Dragon Quest fame, was also famed for having no real plans for the directions of the series. He wrote the pages for the one week, turned them in and didn't have any plan for the next week.


From his page on the Dragon Ball wiki: "At that time, it began to be more fun to think up the story than to draw the pictures. But with the story, I basically only thought of each chapter. That is why I end up getting caught in these quagmires. (laughs) Around the time of Trunks' time travel, it was dreadful. I kept drawing, and it just got more and more incoherent."

By that point he'd been writing Dragon Ball for about half a decade. And the incoherence led to a certain zany charm in the early days. Dinosaurs and kung fu masters coexisted peacefully on Dragon Ball's Earth.

Dragon Ball was enormously successful, obviously, a juggernaut that modern shonen (boy's manga) pay homage to when they're not outright plagiarizing the things that made it such a money cow. So it is entirely possible to just start writing and see how the fictional world turns out.

However, most fiction depends upon an internal set of rules that the reader uses as a sort of map to understand the world. When these rules are broken, it still has to make sense.

They should be broken. That's the second reason they exist: to heighten dramatic tension. People will keep turning pages because "You said people can't do that but this guy is. Why?"

Rules exist to be broken, but they have to be broken on purpose. There's a whole Tvtropes page to plot twists that make no sense. If you don't want the dubious honor of being on that list, keep your rules breaking logical and consistent.