The Dominoes of Storytelling

Domino is a small, rectangular block used as a gaming object. Whether you’re playing dominos with your family, competing in a domino show or simply constructing a set to see if you can get it to fall over, dominoes are fun and educational. They’re also a great metaphor for storytelling. The fact that dominoes require an outside force to move is similar to the way that a story requires a plot to work.

Dominoes are cousins of playing cards and dice. They were first crafted in China in the 1300s, and their unique markings—which we now call pips—represent results from throwing dice. Originally, each domino was marked with six pips representing the results of throwing two six-sided dice. European dominoes were later adapted to include more combinations, including seven and eight-pip tiles.

A player’s score is determined by the total number of pips at the open ends of his or her dominoes, with doubles counting twice. The game continues until a player wins by playing his or her last domino, or the game is blocked because neither player can play anymore. There are many other games played with dominoes, such as the bergen game, where players alternately extend the line of play with a domino in their hand while blocking opponents’ play; the chicken foot game, where a row of dominoes is created by placing one domino at a time on the edge of another domino; or the Mexican train, which adds to a total by adding up the pips of adjacent faces of the dominoes in each player’s hand.

Just as a domino is set up in a carefully sequenced manner to create an impressive display, a story must be constructed in a similar fashion to maintain the reader’s interest. Regardless of whether you write your story off the cuff or use an outline-making program such as Scrivener, you need scenes that advance the plot. They should not feel too long or clunky with unnecessary information (dominoes that are too big), nor should they be too short, and thus appear shallow at key moments of discovery or at the point when the hero must overcome a challenge or plot obstacle. Taking the time to think through your story’s structure and pace will help you avoid this problem.