When the Ending Answers the Beginning (or, The Power of Chiastic Storytelling)
Author Julie Carrick Dalton explores the power of chiastic storytelling, a type of story where the end circles back to the beginning.
When I was 13, I lost a forest I loved. It was my refuge, the place I went to be alone, to read, to cry. Then the trucks rolled in and leveled it.
For years, that loss felt unfinished. It stayed with me as an open loop, a wound in the landscape and in my memory. In many ways, this loss became my origin story. I suspect it’s why I’m drawn to stories that return to their beginnings. It’s why I’m obsessed with chiastic stories.
A chiastic story is essentially an extended version of a chiasmus.
Think of a chiasmus as a sentence that circles back, the second clause returning to the first with a shift in meaning, the way a memory comes back changed.
“It’s not the size of the dog in the fight; it’s the size of the fight in the dog.” —Mark Twain
“Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” —JFK
Chiastic story structure doesn’t simply repeat an earlier idea. It returns to the beginning with an altered, deeper understanding.
We love that kind of return—in art and in life. Audiences cheer when a comic brings back a joke because the callback creates the pleasure of recognition. We sing loudest during the chorus of a song we know. Novelists do something similar when they return to an image, a question, or a wound from the opening and give it new weight at the end.
At its heart, chiastic structure is like a story that wanders away from the beginning, then circles back to the starting point with something it didn’t have before. The ending doesn’t merely close the plot. It reframes what came earlier.
While a traditional three-act structure feels linear, a chiastic structure feels circular. Imagine a clock face: the plot begins at 1:00 and moves clockwise toward 11:00. Now fold the clock in half, so 1:00 meets 11:00, 3:00 meets 9:00, and 5:00 meets 7:00. The moments on either side of the fold don’t need to match perfectly. They only need to speak to each other, letting the later beat cast new light on the earlier one.
In my favorite stories, the ending doesn’t erase the beginning. It explains it.
A familiar example appears in the story of Noah’s ark, which is also the most frequently referenced example of chiastic structure. The narrative begins in corruption and judgment, moves into the ark during the flood, and then emerges in renewal. The central turning point is not the flood itself but the moment when God reaches back out to Noah. The flood is not the most important part of the story. The return—the rainbow—is.
Writers can create a chiastic effect without locking their story into a strict pattern. Percival Everett’s The Trees is a good example because it begins like a crime story but keeps revealing that the present is haunted by the past. The repeated murders, the recurring body image, and the novel’s return to America’s racial violence make the structure feel recursive, as if the book is insisting that history cannot stay buried.
Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere offers a different kind of chiastic effect. It opens with a house fire and then goes back in time to show how the emotional and moral conditions for that blaze were already in place. The ending reframes the opening, helping the reader understand the fire as the result of tensions that had been building all along.
A story can open on a question and close on a recognition. It can begin with confusion and end with clarity. Or it can begin with grief and end with the hard-won knowledge that grief has not vanished, but it is survivable.
That’s where the form becomes personal for me.
My new novel, The Forest Becomes Her, grew out of the same emotional reversal that shaped my own life. As a child, I watched helplessly as trucks rolled in and tore down that forest I loved. That memory looped back when, in my 40s, a forest near my house was about to be clear-cut until—here’s the reversal—I, no longer a helpless child, halted the timbering.
When I wrote the novel, I wanted my characters to move through a journey that reflected my own, shaped by loss, resistance, and the possibility of change. I wanted an ending that says, "Here we are, back where we began. But now we know what it all meant."
Symmetry doesn’t make a story feel predictable. Done well, it makes the story feel inevitable.
You can see this in stories that use iconic lines or images to reveal hidden power that was present at the start. In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy’s ruby slippers work that way. She always had the power to go back to Kansas. The satisfaction comes from understanding that the ending doesn’t uncover something new so much as reveal the power that was quietly there from the start.
I lost a forest I cared deeply about when I was 13.
But as an adult, when history threatened to repeat itself, I leaned into the loop that had played in my mind for 40 years and went back to the beginning. I handed my journey to my characters in The Forest Becomes Her and let them live out the story I had carried for most of my life.
I sent the trucks away.
My characters and I returned to the beginning—changed.
Check out Julie Carrick Dalton's The Forest Becomes Her here:
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