Meet A.V. Smith

We recently connected with A.V. Smith and have shared our conversation below.

A.V., thanks so much for taking the time to share your insights and lessons with us today. We’re particularly interested in hearing about how you became such a resilient person. Where do you get your resilience from?

Family has been instrumental in how I have learned resilience. My family introduced me to my faith, which tells us to be diligent through scripture … “faith without works is dead.” My father pushed my resilience when he stood by me as I worked my way back into football during my junior year in high school after being diagnosed with duodenal ulcers the previous year. He woke me up at 4:15 am each morning to workout before I then traveled an hour and a half to school on Cleveland’s transit system. My brothers each showed me resilience through their own health struggles battling life and death situations; one with polycystic kidney disease and the other with a brain tumor and then bacterial meningitis, later in life. It’s reinforced that faith is the foundation we all share and with it anything is possible. My children even taught me about resilience as I struggled with divorcing my ex, gaining custody and legal troubles years later. The loss of income and taking odd jobs just to survive to now earning six figures, it’s taken faith with hard work and a ton of humility to be able to bounce back.

Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?
My goal is to Story-tell with deliberate character and world building in three separate genres (Crime Fiction, Romantic Suspense, Fantasy Fiction). My core objective is to help the reader bridge the emotion of the words on the page with something important in their own life. I want everyone to find something that helps them see deeper into their own “expression” while making sure they are thoroughly entertained in the process. The template of my writing is life experience, of course, but that is limited to my unique perspective so I aim to use concepts from others. For example, Neely Fuller Jr talked about nine areas of people activity (economics, education, entertainment, labor, law, politics, religion, s*x, war). My goal is to use these in combination with each other as I create stories for consumption regardless of the genre.

Writing in three different genres often wakes me up during the witching hours. Book four in the Romantic Drama series; Madison, is ninety percent complete but there is still glue to be added for it to be balanced and in alignment with the previous three releases. Book Two of Normal Chaos, my Fantasy series, is nearly forty-percent complete. OHIO 10: Book three is about sixty percent complete, with the Audible for Book Two going into contract soon. The biggest and current challenge is the OHIO 10 Feature Film. The script/screenplay is currently in LA with investors who felt a feature film would reach a larger audience than our original TV Pilot. Part of the resiliency we spoke on earlier has helped during this process. My mentor Mike Armstrong tells me that many projects fall to the wayside before getting to the right hands so we are exactly where we need to be and that the project is “ordained”.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
Listening with humility has been extremely useful in my personal growth. It allows me the ability to move beyond my own understanding to see the fine details as well as the bigger picture. I believe this trait helps with the story-telling and character building in my writing. This then leads to flexibility in understanding that we can erase the boxes we self-impose or allow others to put us in. The realization then becomes: there are no boxes only opportunities for growth. Without the years of struggle, I don’t believe I would’ve begun on this writing journey. What I believed was the lowest part of my life was actually the springboard for everything transpiring now, and for that I am grateful.

Who has been most helpful in helping you overcome challenges or build and develop the essential skills, qualities or knowledge you needed to be successful?
I have had a great foundation with family, editors, and mentorship along the way. Michael Armstrong has been a mentor and big brother to me for years. He saw my ability to story-tell and pushed me. College Professor Dr. John Scott showed me how to be authentic in what I wrote. Performing in front of 80k people (sports) and in intimate spoken word environments have both helped considerably.

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