When we think of dominoes, our minds usually go straight to those little black-and-white oblong pieces used to play games that involve knocking them over in long rows. Some people line them up before smashing them all at once while others knock them one by one down individually. Dominoes may also be known as bones, cards, men tiles or stones and used in numerous ways – today’s WONDERER explores their use as part of “The Domino Effect”, where one event has ripple effects that influence everything around it.

A domino is any of a set of 28 small oblong pieces marked with one to six pips on both ends, designed for easy stacking. They typically measure twice their width so as to be easier to stack, hence being known as domino blocks or tumbling blocks due to how easily they tumble over each other when stacked. Each domino piece has a value determined by how many pips appear on its two ends (also referred to as its suits); double six dominoes for instance have six pips on each end and thus belong to threes suit; other variants have four, fives suits etc; any without markings is known as blank or zero dominoes.

The standard domino set contains 28 tiles; however, larger sets exist for various uses including scoring games requiring multiple players. Because combinations of ends are limited by total number of pips (pips are the dots on a domino tile), most sets extend by including additional numbers in each suit such as triple sixes, sevens and eights to accommodate more players and increase game possibilities.

Hevesh, who boasts more than two million subscribers on YouTube, creates elaborate domino installations as entertainment. Her largest domino arrangements take several minutes each to fall and often contain thousands of dominoes; she is currently working on breaking the Guinness World Record for most dominoes toppled at once in circular formation.

Assuming you use dominoes as a metaphor for some aspect of your writing, it is critical that each scene logically leads into and off from one another. If a character reveals a key clue that she should act upon later on in a scene but she fails to do so, there could be something amiss with your plot.

If you prefer pantster-writing style novels, or don’t create detailed outlines of them ahead of time, it can be easy to end up with scenes that don’t flow together or have enough impactful connection between scenes that come before them. To prevent this, Scrivener can be helpful for planning out your story and eliminating scenes that don’t work properly.