The domino effect describes a chain of events in which one event triggers another, and so on. This is a metaphor for how one decision can affect a whole group of people. When writing a story, using the domino effect helps your reader understand how a character’s actions affect the people around them and the outcome of the situation. This is important in a story because readers need to feel connected to your characters and want to continue reading to see what happens next.
Domino is a game played with a set of small rectangular wood or plastic blocks, each bearing from one to six pips or dots, which are placed on a table or other flat surface in a pattern of lines or angular designs. A complete set of dominoes includes 28 such tiles. Each player takes a turn playing a tile to a line or angular pattern, positioning it so that it touches two matching ends of existing dominoes in the chain or line. If the resulting chain or line shows a number that is useful to the player or distasteful to his opponent, the player is said to have “stitched up” the ends.
In a domino game, when a single domino falls over, much of its potential energy converts into kinetic energy, which is then transmitted to the other dominoes through the line or angular design. The result is a cascade of dominoes that knock over each other in succession, one after the other, until the last domino falls. The domino effect is the underlying mechanism of many games played with the dominoes.
A domino can be a metaphor for many situations in life and in business. In a company, for example, it may be the way in which a leader takes steps to turn a failing business around. In a more general sense, it is also the way in which something small can cause a great change. For example, if a person has a small debt, he may decide to pay it off, which in turn causes him to be able to afford to buy a larger house.
One of the ways a writer can use this concept of a domino effect is to make sure that all scenes in his story advance the plot and lead up to a satisfying conclusion. This means that a scene cannot be overlong or overly short, and the dominoes must be spaced correctly so that they fall at an appropriate time.
This is true whether the story is fiction or nonfiction. For instance, in a story about a political crisis, the author can make sure that his scenes do not run counter to what readers think is logical by considering the domino effect and how it might affect his audience.
In art, the domino effect can be used to create a wide variety of designs and shapes. It is possible to create curved lines, grids that form pictures when the dominoes are laid out, stacked walls, and 3D structures such as pyramids. In creating these works of art, a domino designer follows a similar process to an engineer or architect, and starts with a sketch of the layout.