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I write both fiction and non-fiction. As a result from time to time, I'm asked what the difference is, when writing them. I always say: it's a question of where you start. With non-fiction, you start at the end. Or close to it, at least.  Which sounds, now I think about it, both facile and slightly ridiculous. But for me, anyway, it's true.

It's a matter of process. I write historical non-fiction aimed at both the popular and the academic markets. A book or an article is the final stage in the project. To get myself to that point, I've already spent a considerable amount of time on preparatory work. For the sort of history I specialise in - mediaeval British and particularly Celtic - this usually begins with a collection of source materials composed in the period which I'm intending to study, often written in Old Welsh or Old English or Latin and available in rather elderly editions or even in single manuscripts. The bulk of the work is in reading and studying these sources, working out their relationships to each other and their biases and problems, in seeing what it is they say, hint at and convey. There is also a long period analysing and absorbing secondary materials - books and articles by other scholars, texts from other cultures and such things. By the time I come to the writing stage, the bulk of the work is behind me and I am drawing conclusions. Non-fiction is a culmination, a summation of what has gone before, a tip of an often rather inky iceberg. I tend to write non-fiction fairly fast: I know what needs to go where and how I need to relate it to the rest of what surrounds it. It's a question of ordering and explaining and laying out. The end, or at least the beginning of the end, of that project. Indeed, the last section I tend to write with non-fiction is usually the introduction.

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We met George Thomas Jones on Tuesday evening in his home. He is the town historian and newspaper columnist, whose columns have been made into books, "Happenings in Old Monroeville, Volumes One and Two." He was born in 1922 and moved to Monroeville in 1926 and was about three years ahead of Harper Lee in school. He has also been caring for his wife, Louise, who has been bedridden for fifteen years with Parkinson's disease. Louise and Harper Lee were good friends and played golf together. Bunny Hines, the librarian, remarked about him, "George Thomas Jones will have a jewel in his crown!"

Jones' mother started the lunchroom program at school. She made ham, pimento, and banana & peanut butter sandwiches. Baby Ruth candy bars cost a nickel. Vegetable soup and crackers were ten cents. She knew the country kids couldn't go home for lunch, and she felt the school needed a lunchroom, so she set up one in the school basement.

Sitting in his living room, we were transported back to the days of old Monroeville. He told of us childhood games like "Hot Grease in the Kitchen" and watching "Nelle" take on three boys on the playground after a hair-pulling incident.

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