The domino effect, the chain reaction that results from one small action, is a powerful metaphor for storytelling. If you’ve ever watched a domino fall and watch the subsequent cascade, it’s easy to see how this concept could apply to the way we tell our stories.
A domino is a small rectangular piece of wood, ivory, bone, or another material. Each domino features a line down the middle, visually dividing it into two squares with an arrangement of dots—called pips—on each side. The dominant side of each piece has a specific value, while the other side is blank or identically patterned.
Normally, the domino is twice as long as wide. Typically, a set contains 28 dominoes, with the largest sets containing 190 dominoes. Dominoes are used for a variety of games, both recreational and instructional. In the classroom, students can use a set of dominoes with pictures to match objects and concepts that they have learned about in class. For example, students can place a picture of an animal on one domino and the name of that animal on another. They can then play a game of dominoes where they put the matching animals together and say their names out loud to reinforce their learning.
Hevesh began creating domino arrangements as a child and has since gone on to become a professional domino artist. Her YouTube channel, Hevesh5, has more than 2 million subscribers, and she creates impressive domino setups for movies, TV shows, and events, including an album launch for pop star Katy Perry. Her largest dominoes can take several nail-biting minutes to fall, and she often works on multiple sections of a display at once, making sure they all work perfectly.
As a result, Hevesh makes test versions of each section of her installations before adding them to the final display. This helps her to ensure that each part of the design is working correctly and enables her to make precise corrections when something doesn’t work as planned. This process also helps her to identify the best ways to connect and manipulate the different sections of a domino setup, which improves the overall effect of the final display.
Similarly, when we write our stories, we need to make sure that each scene advances the story logically and influences the next scene in a meaningful way. If we skip a scene, or write a scene that doesn’t have enough impact on the scenes ahead of it, our readers will likely lose interest pretty quickly. If your story’s scenes are in the wrong order or don’t have enough logical impact, it might be time to rewrite them.