Everything's Still An Offer

Written by Robert Poynton – This article is from AIM Issue 1 (released December 2022).

I wrote Everything’s An Offer for one person - me.

I wrote to make sense of what I was learning, to try to get my arms around how the ideas and practices embodied by improvisers on stage connect with the messy, everyday realities of ordinary life and work. Writing is hard and that is what makes it a powerful discipline. It forced me to clarify my thinking and give my ideas a solid grounding.

In a context like Oxford University, where I began to work in 2002, that helped. I knew that having a book would give me at least a fig leaf of respectability, even if no-one ever read it. What I didn’t anticipate was how the writing process would show up in me. Had I burned the manuscript before anyone saw it, it would still have been worthwhile, because the writing enabled me to speak with a different kind of authority and confidence about something which, at the time, seemed ridiculous to many.

It took a while - I was working on Everything’s an Offer from 2002 to 2008, though much of what I was doing in the first couple of years I would now call research rather than writing.

Energy and interests

This was partly because I had a young family and a nascent business, but also because I had no idea what I was doing. So I started by starting and learned by doing.

I wrote it out of order, following my energy and interests, rather than a plan. I let the structure emerge from the writing, rather than writing to fill in a structure. The process was punctuated by moments of inspiration that I couldn’t possibly have anticipated. For example, I vividly remember, one stoking hot summer afternoon in Avila, Spain, when I found the first sentence, and with it the elusive voice on which so much hinges. That was like understanding ‘the game within the game’ and unlocked things in a magical way.

I say ‘found’ because that is how writing feels to me - I am finding things, not creating them; as if I were wandering along a beach picking up and discarding words like pebbles, until I find the ones I like.

It is personal

It is a very personal book. One agent described it as “long-winded and talky” and I can see why she thought so. But plenty of people like that. Those who know me say it is like having a conversation and prefer it to the more pared-down book, Do Improvise. 

A book is an extension of yourself, like a search algorithm or radioactive marker, that takes your ideas out into the world and makes connections with other people and ideas. Everything’s an Offer brought me some of my closest friends.

Once written, books stay written, so they can have a long life, which, like any life, can be full of surprises. When it came out a number of people told me how it helped them through a bout of mental illness, something I neither imagined nor intended. And recently I discovered that the chapter on status is being used as a set text in a business school where I have never worked, by someone I have never met.

Looking back at the text now, it is amazing to me how much is in it. It is packed with ideas and images – from ‘control addiction’ to a discussion of embodied and tacit knowledge - many of which I had forgotten about. Some of it feels prescient. The model has stood the test of time (and two editions of Do Improvise), though now I draw it as a Venn diagram, not a triangle.

I am not sure if this is depressing or inspiring. On the one hand it reminds me there are deep, robust patterns at work, which I have been interested in and working with for over twenty years and will probably continue to be fascinated with until I die. Which is reassuring. But in my more vulnerable moments it makes me feel like I haven’t learned anything at all.

An invitation to explore

I invite you to read it in the same spirit that I wrote it. As an exploration. Start in the middle, or at the end. Dip into it. Open on a random page. Scan the contents page to find a theme or piece of practice you are curious about or working with. Use the index (or the search function on a pdf) to look up what I have to say about Margaret Atwood, the relaxation response, Toy Story or anything else that takes your fancy.

I am going to do something similar: in future editions of this magazine I will pick out a passage and comment on it from my current perspective. We can take the title literally and use anything and everything within it as an offer, and see where that takes us.