Dominoes are a versatile toy, both a fun way to spend time with friends or family and an engaging tool for teaching children about counting. Each domino is a rectangular piece of wood or plastic with an arrangement of spots, called pips, on one side and a blank or identically patterned opposite side. Dominoes are most familiar to us as a game where players set up a line of domino pieces and then knock them over, but they can also be used for more complex games like a form of Solitaire or trick-taking.
In a domino rally, each player takes turns laying down tiles that match the previous ones in the row: for example, a double-six and a double-five might be matched up to score points by a single piece (a “spinner”) that’s placed in front of them. The first player to complete the matching line scores. Then the next player takes a turn, and so on. If no match can be made, the player forfeits. Some people are so skilled at domino that they can create spectacular layouts of hundreds or even thousands of dominoes that take several nail-biting minutes for their full effect to be realized. Hevesh, a young woman who goes by the YouTube name Hevesh5, has amassed more than 2 million subscribers on her channel, which features videos of her creating intricate domino art. She has created domino arrangements for movies, TV shows, and events, including the album launch of pop star Katy Perry.
Stephen Morris, a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto, recently demonstrated how powerful the domino effect is by setting up 13 dominoes, each of which was about 1.5 times larger than the previous one. The first domino was so tiny – just 5 millimeters tall and 1 millimeter thick – that it had to be set up with a tweezer, while the 13th was over a meter tall.
Domino has long been a metaphor for the power of small actions that lead to big effects. This concept was popularized in the 1957 movie, “The Domino Principle,” which described the effect that a single domino can have when it falls on top of another. The movie was based on a real event that occurred in a small town in California during the Great Depression when a man threw a stone into a church and caused an earthquake that knocked down a series of buildings and led to the formation of a large avalanche.
Whether you’re writing your novel off the cuff or following an outline, plotting a story is about understanding how one scene can naturally influence the next. By considering the domino effect in your story, you can ensure that your readers will keep turning pages to find out what happens next.