How it Works

StoryCommons offers a complete set of resources, guidelines and prompts for telling the most important stories of our lives. In utilizing these storytelling tools, you will be guided to tell your stories in a timeless and universal structure that takes you to a deeper level of meaning and understanding.

Through this process, everyone learns something from each other. Personal stories get to the heart of who we are as human beings living in this world together. We owe it to ourselves – and to each other – to tell and share our stories and the lessons gained from our journeys through the struggles, transformations, and triumphs of life that have shaped us into who we are at our core.

The Commons, where our stories are stored, is always open for browsing and researching. This is where we discover and dialogue about what our challenges have been, how we have faced them, and who we are as a result of them. The Commons is an ever-growing tree of many branches, with each branch representing a different theme, topic, or archetype that we all experience in this life.

StoryCommons, the go-to place for personal storytelling of all kinds, promotes community-building around the stories that connect and unite us as one human family. StoryCommons is distinguished from other sites in these interactive ways:

1. It provides the most extensive toolbox, guidelines, resources, and services for personal storytelling, offering you the opportunity to develop a better crafted story of whatever part of your life you choose to write about and share with others;

2. As you, and others, add your stories to the Commons, and others read them, we all discover similarities, through the common motifs and archetypes that all of our stories share, and this literally connects each of us until the entire human family is connected through the stories we all share with each other;

3. It offers a fully searchable, continually expanding collection of story types that can be read, listened to, or watched; and,

4. It offers a growing, vibrant, diverse, online community transcending boundaries of culture and geography.

Our stories, the narrative DNA that bind us all as human beings living the same types of experiences, create communities of memory, just as did sacred stories told in traditional communities. As we tell and share more and more of these soulful stories, a love and appreciation for all living creatures emerges, and cannot help but bring us closer together.