How Do You Plan a Domino Rally?
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When Lily Hevesh was 9, her grandparents gave her a classic 28-piece domino set. She loved setting up the pieces in a straight or curved line, flicking the first one and watching them cascade down. Now 20, Hevesh is a professional domino artist who has created mind-blowing setups for movies, TV shows and events (including a record-setting rainbow spiral made of 12,000 dominoes). She also runs a popular YouTube channel featuring videos of her work.
It takes years of practice to build the precision needed for such elaborate creations. But once she sets up an entire arrangement, it’s simply a matter of letting nature take its course: “Once I create my domino chains, it’s really just a matter of putting them out there and then waiting for the laws of physics to come into play,” she says.
Hevesh uses a version of the engineering-design process to plan her setups, starting with an idea or theme and brainstorming images or words that might be associated with it. Then she considers what materials to use, balancing weight and stability against size and color. Once she has a design in place, she starts placing and positioning the dominoes and testing it with a smaller model before moving on to the larger ones. Finally, she puts the full arrangement out in front of her and waits for it to fall, often taking several nail-biting minutes before it comes crashing down.
The forces at play when a domino falls are simple: Gravity pulls each domino down from its center of gravity, and the more stacked up it is, the more gravity pulls on each piece. In addition, each domino has a little inertia: It resists motion when there is no outside force pushing or pulling on it. But a tiny nudge is enough to tip a domino past its tipping point. Once it does, its potential energy converts to kinetic energy and provides the push needed to knock over the next domino. And so on until the last domino has fallen.
Like a domino rally, the pace of your story is important. If your scenes feel too long (heavy on details and minutiae) or short (too shallow at moments of great discovery or at plot points), you’re losing readers’ interest. Whether you’re a pantser who writes off the cuff without an outline or a plotter who uses Scrivener to construct your manuscript, you need to keep these domino principles in mind.