Domino is a fun, social game that’s enjoyed by people from all over the world. From the hustle and bustle of city squares to the quiet sanctuaries of village homes, domino is a timeless activity that connects us across cultures and language barriers.
The beauty of the domino effect lies in its simplicity: just place one piece on top of another, and then wait for the other pieces to fall down in a predictable order. When this occurs, the result is an intricate and satisfying chain reaction. Likewise, a great story is often simple in its structure, but has the power to touch and change lives.
From the time she was 9, Lily Hevesh has had a passion for dominoes. By the age of 10, she’d started creating and posting domino projects on YouTube, and now, at 20, Hevesh is a professional domino artist. She’s created elaborate displays for movies, TV shows, and even the Katy Perry album launch. She has built lines of dominoes that are 24 inches long, and she’s helped to set the Guinness World Record for the most dominoes in a circular arrangement—76,017. Her largest creations take several nail-biting minutes to fall.
In her domino art, Hevesh begins each project by planning out how she wants it to look. She uses fractions to determine how many dominoes she’ll need for a particular track and how they’ll be arranged. For example, if she wants a curved line of dominoes to fall down in a certain direction, she’ll draw out a diagram on paper that includes the start and end point of each segment. She’ll also draw arrows to show how the dominoes will be connected and what kind of shape each segment will make when it falls.
As Hevesh explains in her video, “I’m pretty good at preventing big accidental topples, but small ones happen in just about every project.” To help prevent these, she sometimes omits some dominoes until the last minute. This way, if she or a teammate accidentally knocks over a single domino, it won’t bring the entire installation down.
In the same way, if you want your novel to succeed, you need to pay close attention to how each scene progresses. Each scene should advance the plot, but it shouldn’t feel overly long (heavy on details and minutiae) or too short (making the reader want to stop reading before the hero reaches a major discovery). In other words, each domino should be just right to provide a satisfying cascade of events for your readers.
