Tokoni believes everyone has a story to tell.

If you can’t get your message across in 140 characters on Twitter, join the community on Tokoni and tell your story to an audience that appreciates what you have to say.

It’s an easy tool to use. Set up your profile and start sharing your stories.  You can even start to record your autobiography or memoir one story at a time. When finished adding a story, choose a category and add tags (keywords) so your story can be easily found through search.

Create a Hub

A hub is a place for Tokoni members (Tokos) to collaborate, share and discuss stories around a topic. Hubs can be created from any number of places, like your profile page, a story page, and from the hubs link on the navigation bar on the top of every page.  When you create a hub you can name it, give it a description, add images or even video, and categories.

Let me tell you a story…

There was once a family of immigrants who decided to flee their country after a world-wide conflict left many people without homes and little hope for the future. The family first arrived in the Far North where they had no experience of the weather, the culture and the way of life in general.

They found it hard to relate to a new land and hoped to return home one day, but gradually, without even realising it was happening, they adapted to the new way of life.

When finally they had worked hard enough to save the money for the journey home, much to their surprise they realised that they didn’t want to go. The land they had fled to was their new home and that’s where they decided to stay.

Stories change the way we relate to each other

If I tell you this is my family story and show you photos from my family album you will probably now have a very different impression of me from when you first began this article.

Perhaps your background is similar. Somewhere in your history are people who faced the same challenges. If this is so, then we share parts of the story, and in this way we have established common ground on which to relate to each other. Even if your life experience bears no resemblance to mine, you have shared some of my experiences through my story.

If you don’t have a personal blog, telling your story on Tokoni is a great way to get published and share your story with others.

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Don’t read this if you’re a fan of ‘The Secret’ (or under 16)

The Secret That Saved My Life by Ari Brouillette

Please allow me to share with you how “The Secret” changed my life and in a very real and substantive way allowed me to overcome a severe crisis in my personal life. It is well known that the premise of “The Secret” is the science of attracting the things in life that you desire and need and in removing from your life those things that you don’t want. Before finding this book, I knew nothing of these principles, the process of positive visualization, and had actually engaged in reckless behaviors to the point of endangering my own life and wellbeing.

Now read on…

http://tinyurl.com/7kt9ql

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Before you begin to write your life story, you need to ask yourself a simple question. Who am I writing for?

• Are you writing for your family and those who come after you?
• Are you writing for yourself alone, to satisfy a creative need?
• Do you write to find meaning in the disjointed events that make up your life?
• Are you hoping for publication because you think your life story has relevance to people you are never likely to meet?

The answer to this question will help you find your starting point.

For example, if you decide to write an autobiography and include your family history you will need to make lists, record dates, and write down areas for research that answer questions such as:

What year did my grandfather arrive in this country?
Was that 1972 or 1975 when I won the trophy?
Who attended our first reunion?

Autobiography or memoir?

This chronological account of your life would technically be classed as autobiography. Autobiography in the classical sense was once only the territory of the rich and famous. Soldiers, statesmen and high achievers in various fields of life were either encouraged or inspired to record the exceptional events of their lives for posterity.
Memoirs, however, are usually based on selections of significant events in the author’s life. These may be related to a specific theme such as coming of age, a particular achievement, an occupation, travel experiences and so on. Some examples of memoir writing to a travel theme are:
Isak Dineson – Out of Africa
Peter Mayle – A Year in Provence
Ernest Hemingway – A Moveable Feast
George Orwell – Down and Out in Paris and London

Now we have the ‘new autobiography’

In the late twentieth-century something interesting happened to the autobiography genre – it broke free from its traditional moorings among the famous and the elite and became available to all who cared to attempt the uncharted waters of what has been described as a ‘new literary form’. This new form combines the techniques of both autobiography and memoir, and draws on the fictional tools of character, scene and plot to create stories that add meaning and value to relatively insignificant events.

And we also have the ‘digital’ memoir

Yet a new form of personal narrative has recently emerged driven by the development of new media. Writers who are not inspired to create lengthy texts can now take advantage of digital storytelling techniques to create both textual and visual records of their memoirs. Photographs, video, audio and text can be assembled using simple and freely accessible blogging tools and social media sites.

You may want to explore all of these options

When creating your life story, either as a chronological narrative, a story with a theme or a digital record of events, you will need to learn the techniques of storytelling. There are hard and fast rules around the use of grammar, point of view, voice and structure that must be learned if your writing is to be coherent and readable. Some might object that rules were made to be broken and that writing is a fluid form to be explored from many different angles. This is true, but my advice is to learn the rules first and then, when you are confident that you have mastered them, go right ahead and test the boundaries of writing. It’s you story after all.

Whether your life story is to be a gift to your family and friends or self-published to the wider public in print or on the Internet, it will also be a gift to yourself and a permanent record of your life’s goals and achievements.
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