We’ve all seen those lineups of hundreds or thousands of dominoes, carefully placed in a row, then all that’s left to do is give them the slightest nudge and they fall into place in a beautiful cascade. That’s what we call the “domino effect.” And when it comes to narrative, we see a similar effect in action sequences. A single domino is ineffective by itself, but when a writer sets up a series of them—one after the other, with a first and a last—then they naturally lead to the next scene.
Domino is a tabletop game that can be played by two or more people. In the most basic form, the game consists of 28 tiles—a double-six set—that are shuffled and formed into a stock, or boneyard. Players then draw seven tiles from the stock, with each player keeping track of their own. The goal is to be the first to get all of their tiles to lie on their edge, with the pips (or numbers) facing up. Some sets also feature a contrasting color—usually MOP, ivory, or ebony—on the bottom half of the tiles for a different look and feel.
A professional domino artist named Hevesh has a YouTube channel where she shows off some of her impressive creations. She has built displays that involve up to 76,017 dominoes and even created an album launch for pop star Katy Perry! Her largest domino setups take several nail-biting minutes to fall. It’s not only an incredible show of talent, but it’s a great demonstration of the power of the domino effect.
In comics, Domino is a hard-boiled mercenary who was once employed by X-Corporation in Hong Kong where she helped the company hinder John Sublime’s Third Species mutant organ harvesting movement. Eventually she joined X-Force and became its co-leader with Cable after they met on the eve of Earth’s being overlapped with Reality-295 during the Age of Apocalypse. She has since worked with former Six Pack teammates Grizzly and Hammer, as well as the mutant bounty hunter Copycat.
A writer uses the domino effect in their stories in a way that’s very similar to how a domino builder uses them: to create an intricate, impressive, and mesmerizing display that they know will be a crowd-pleaser. And that’s precisely what a story is: a series of scenes, one after the other, that eventually lead to the big finale. The key is that every scene must be built upon the previous ones, and if any of them are not done well or if there’s no momentum, it’ll all crumble in an instant.