Ashley Andrade started writing when she discovered a world building website on her computer.
“I was enamored with fantasy laid out in books and the process of building a world of your own imagination from a young age. Coming out of elementary school, I was given access to a computer and found myself on a roleplaying website where I would often spend hours creating worlds, characters, and scenarios to write about along with tens of hundreds of other people. I learned a lot of what I know about writing and the creative process from the people and interactions I had there,” she says.
Her latest writing project was a play, “Totally Not a Date,” which won Barter Theatre’s Young Playwrights Festival. This was her second time entering. Her first entry did not place in the competition.
“My play was a story about a high school aged boy, named Nate, who had formed a crush on one of his friends and decided to enlist the help of his older brother to ask her out on a date. Nate invited the girl to chat in a coffee shop and shared a wireless earbud with his brother who would sit outside the shop and tell Nate what to say in order to impress her. From there, everything begins to rapidly fall apart as, as it turns out, the brother was probably not the right person for the job. I wanted it to be a comedy piece that displayed a theme of having confidence in being yourself, and I spent most of my time trying to figure out ways to express the emotions I wanted each character to embody through their dialogue alone.
“When the winners for the Playwrights Festival were first announced, I was honestly numb. In my head, I never thought that a play that I wrote would even come close to winning, so hearing my teacher, Mrs. Kendrick, tell me I was in the top three only to hear my play later announced as first was like an out of body experience. It felt like it was a dream, and it didn’t even completely dawn on me that I had actually won until a few days later when I fully processed it. Overall, winning meant a lot to me and gave me a large amount of pride for my work that I have had the habit of putting myself down for. I was incredibly impressed with each of the plays that were performed,” she says.
Ashley became interested in playwriting because of her interest in drama.
“I think the fact that I have been on the other side of the script interests me most about playwriting. I have been in my school’s drama club since the Spring of my freshman year and have had a part in every production they have put on since the Fall of my sophomore year. I loved reading the scripts that were handed to us, and it always impressed me how playwrights managed to create entire scenes from mainly just dialogue and a few stage directions.
“My favorite subject to write about is probably self-reflection. A lot of the things I write about, even if they may not seem like it at first glance, reflect parts of me or parts of the people around me in some way,” she says.
Plays are not her usual genre. She prefers short stories and poetry. “They’re short enough for me to put a lot of thought and refining into small details and metaphors without overwhelming myself with length,” she says. One of her poems won the Johnson City Sesquicentennial Poetry Contest and was placed in the city’s time capsule.
Her biggest influence is her mother. “She was always a bright and encouraging light for anything I wanted to do before she passed. My father, my grandparents, and teachers Seth Grindstaff and Kelly Kendrick are also big influences that have pushed me to continue writing,” Ashley says.
Ashley is 18 and attends Sullivan Central High School, Kingsport, Tennessee. She is the daughter of Teresa and Keven Andrade. She plans to enter the medical or social work field, but plans to stay involved with theater throughout college, as she enjoys acting and building productions.
