Her father had inspired her to start writing when she was in the sixth grade, but Pierce stopped after four years. She attended the University of Pennsylvania to study psychology, and didn't return to writing until her junior year in college, when she penned a five- page short story.
After selling another story a year later, she enrolled in a fiction writing course. "I owe my career as a writer and my approach to writing to people like my writing mentor, David Bradley (a college fiction writing teacher), who taught me that writing is not an arcane and mystical process, administered by the initiate and fraught with obstacles, but an enjoyable pastime that gives other people as much pleasure as it does me," Pierce once told SATA. "I enjoy telling stories, and, although some of my topics are grim, people get caught up in them."
On the advice of Bradley, Pierce began writing a novel. Putting her psychology degree on hold, she tried to get the 732-page work published: The Song of the Lioness, about an adventurous young woman named Alanna. During this time, Pierce took a number of "rent-paying" jobs, which included measuring and drawing scales of houses, reviewing martial arts movies for a magazine, reading manuscripts for Silhouette romances, tutoring high school students, and working as a tobacco farm laborer.
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