Digging for Story: Seamus Heaney on Writing as Excavation

Storycraft: Mini-Series - Lessons from Great Writing

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Storycraft: Mini-Series - Lessons from Great Writing - #2: Seamus Heaney — Writing as Excavation

“If you have the words, there’s always a chance that you’ll find the way.” - Seamus Heaney

Photos from a wonderful exhibition in Dublin on the life of Heaney

My mother taught English so I grew up in a house full of books - Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Homer, D.H. Lawrence, W.B.Yeats, Dickens - but her favourite was (and is) Seamus Heaney who could write no wrong in her eyes.

While I loved reading all those others writers, and many more besides, I was drawn to Seamus Heaney’s poetry time and time again. And it wasn’t simply because he was a ‘local lad’ and spoke of the land and places we knew and ways of being we could intimately understand. There was the rhythm of his writing - so steady, steadfast, determined. He turfed away at words.

From Seamus Heaney’s early life

When I read Mid-Term Break (a poem about the death of his young brother) I remember the shiver down my spine on reaching the final line: ‘A four-foot box, a foot for every year’ - the way in which Heaney had built up the poem to lead exactly here. It was as if it could be no other way. He had that quality, a resolute frankness, to his writing, like it was something that grew from him, rooted in a Northern Irish childhood.

Years later, when I was addressing a writers’ conference, (and by now Heaney had a Nobel Prize for Literature for his writing) it was this line from Digging that I used in my speech:

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests.

I’ll dig with it.

Writers dig for the truth, buried under the stony ground of fragments of ideas.

Digging by Seamus Heaney from Death of a Naturalist

Heaney saw writing as a form of excavation: digging into small moments; letting nature and tradition weave through the lines of his poetry, letting symbolism and the ‘unsaid’ carry weight, in writing that remains deeply human.

Lessons I learned from Seamus Heaney’s Poetry

I learned that you can say a lot with silence when you write. You set up an idea, a juxtaposition, a contrast, and let it play out in your reader’s mind. Make space for meaning, and make space for the reading.

I learned that writing about nature is a powerful way to write about life, it roots ideas, creates eco-systems and landscapes of the imagination, and it makes intangible things concrete.

I learned how to write using my senses - Heaney uses the smell of peat, cut turf, woodsmoke, the mustiness of a potato harvest, the mineral scent of earth. He draws on the sounds of rural work in the fields, natural sounds like rain, dripping water, wind through the grass, the birds calling or cows lowing. He uses the texture of a spade held in the hand, the materials of a rural life (rope, twine, flax, metal tools). These turns of phrase rooted in the physical signal so much that otherwise goes unsaid.

Heaney on writing

I learned that if you want to write about something complex, pick something that is universal (family, loss, death, birth). Start there.

I learned about the bird’s eye view - how to look down on a scene and figure out the patterns. With perspective and distance you can often see the work more clearly.

I learned that one line of poetry can hold a lifetime of hope or grief.

I learned that you don’t have to travel far from home to make meaning in the world around you.

Heaney’s Stepping Stones in between some of my books on Ireland

I learned the value of the Irish language, this language that refuses to die out, a language that holds so much information about our connection to land and the wider universe around us, and how that language - lost to so many of us now in Ireland - deserves to be cherished and written about and written in and spoken, and that by understanding better my own connection and feelings around the Irish language, how that helped me better understand all those people whose own languages are being lost or shrinking in a globalised world in which nuance is flattened, and language becomes less bewitching and magical. Here’s a beautiful interview where he speaks about the Irish language and its influence on his writing:

I learned that poetry is made to be spoken out loud. Here’s Seamus reading Digging:

I learned that writing is like an arrow - if the purpose is clear you can hit your target. If you waver, and you’ll end up in the ditch.

Heaney was a writer who opened many doors to other Irish writers for me. People like W.B.Yeats, Brian Friel and Patrick Kavanagh. But also to the Irish legends and myths.

I learned the value of consistency and hard work. He would set up his desk facing a wall to avoid distraction and focus on the ‘inner room’ of writing.

I learned not to get hung up on praise or criticism for your writing - this is one of the most empowering gifts any writer can give themselves. Of course we write for connection, to build a bridge, to let the reader know they are not alone - but what the reader makes of your words is for them, not you.

I learned a great deal about lyricism in writing from Heaney, that good writing always has a bit of a lilt to it, a rhythm, and that emotion can travel alongside that shaping of story, built into the words you would choose. Sometimes I wonder if this is a Celtic trait, a hangover from centuries of storytelling passed on from one generation to the next.

“The Way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.” - Seamus Heaney

His own writing was shaped by both Irish writers, by Virgil, Dante and writers like Robert Frost, and of course by the land around him. He carved and dug his own poems in the way a turf-cutter would slice the earth.

“By God, the old man could handle a spade.”

Here are some exercises for your own writing and a Heaney-inspired reading list for you:

Writing Exercises - Lessons From Seamus Heaney:

1, Idea: The Earth of Memory

Explanation/Example: In his essay Feeling into Words, Heaney describes writing as digging into the earth of memory and experience, the ‘archaeology of the imagination’ — digging past surfaces until you strike something elemental. In “Digging”, the pen becomes a spade; writing becomes labour that unearths the past.

Lesson: Writing is not just expression; it’s a tool to uncover what is buried. Go deeper than description — find the roots.

Try This: Choose a childhood memory. Write a paragraph that begins with one concrete detail (a smell, sound, or object). Then “dig down” — ask what lies beneath that detail. Write again, pushing past the surface until you touch something essential (an emotion, a truth, a secret).

2. Idea: Words Reveal Feelings You Didn’t Know You Had

Explanation/Example: Heaney uses the notion of the poet digging with his pen. It’s a kind of excavation. Often in drafting, the right word unearths an emotion you didn’t consciously intend.

Lesson: Don’t wait for perfect clarity before writing. Let the act of language itself bring hidden emotions into the light.

Try This: Free-write for 10 minutes on an ordinary object (a key, a shoe, a stone). Don’t plan what to say — keep the pen moving. Afterward, circle any unexpected words or phrases that carry emotional weight. Expand on one.

3. Idea: Rootedness and Loosening

Explanation/Example: Heaney insisted on faithfulness to his origins (the Irish soil, speech, and labour) but also allowed his work to “loosen” — to use myth, history, and symbolism that carried beyond the local.

Lesson: Ground your writing in place and personal truth, but don’t be afraid to widen the frame with symbol, myth, or history.

Try This: Write a scene set in your home place — use one concrete local detail (dialect word, weather, soil, food). Then, in revision, layer in an image or symbol that gives it larger resonance (myth, legend, universal metaphor).

2. Idea: Lyricism — the music of language

Explanation/Example: Heaney’s poems often move like songs: “The squelch and slap / Of soggy peat” (Digging) isn’t just description — the sound of the words mirrors the sound of the spade in the earth.

Lesson: Meaning deepens when language carries music. Rhythm, alliteration, assonance, and cadence create resonance that logic alone can’t.

Try This: Take a plain sentence (“I walked across the wet field”). Rewrite it three ways, focusing on sound: add alliteration, play with rhythm, swap in words for musicality. Notice how each version changes the mood.

3. Idea: Saying more with silence

Explanation/Example: The poem “Punishment”, isn’t overtly political, but the bog body becomes a stand-in for violence, shame, and history. What’s unsaid presses as heavily as what is written.

Lesson: Silence is part of the text. What you leave out can create tension, depth, and space for readers to participate.

Try This: Write a short dialogue where two people avoid naming the real subject (grief, desire, regret). Let gesture, pause, or setting do the work. Reread it and underline the silences.

4. Idea: The Irish language as deep rootedness

Explanation/Example: Heaney grew up with English as his schooling tongue and Irish echoing in the background of place names, field names, family speech. It shaped his sense of rhythm, metaphor, and identity. Of Irish, he has said: “Not to learn Irish is to miss the opportunity of understanding what life in this country has meant and could mean in a better future.”

Lesson: The language(s) you inherit — even if half-remembered — can become an underground stream feeding your writing. Attend to their cadences, their rootedness.

Try This: Write down a word or phrase from your family, region, or a language you grew up hearing. Free-associate: what memories or images cling to that sound? Use it as the seed for a short piece.

Reading List 📚

Seamus Heaney’s Own Work (selected & representative)

Death of a Naturalist (1966) — first collection; childhood, farming life, bogland beginnings.

Door into the Dark (1969) — continues rural themes, with sharpening craft.

Wintering Out (1972) — introduces “bog poems,” landscape tied to Irish politics.

North (1975) — major work; myth, history, violence, and Troubles.

Field Work (1979) — more personal, elegiac, balanced against politics.

Station Island (1984) — pilgrimage, voices of Irish history and conscience.

The Haw Lantern (1987) — leaner, moral, with Dantean influence.

Seeing Things (1991) — meditations on memory, death, and vision.

The Spirit Level (1996) — post-Nobel work; balance, reconciliation.

Electric Light (2001) — travel, classical echoes, memory.

District and Circle (2006) — returns to darker tones, urban and rural.

Human Chain (2010) — final collection; frailty, legacy, and gift.

Prose:

Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968–1978

The Government of the Tongue (1988)

The Redress of Poetry (1995)

Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971–2001

Poets Who Shaped Him

• W.B. Yeats — Irish inheritance; myth, history, lyric force.

• Patrick Kavanagh — Irish rural realism; finding poetry in ordinary fields and ditches.

• Gerard Manley Hopkins — sprung rhythm, dense texture of language.

• T.S. Eliot — especially Four Quartets (echoes in Heaney’s meditative poems).

• Robert Frost — plain speech, rural metaphor, “the sound of sense.”

• Ted Hughes — elemental, earthy force of imagery (Heaney admired his rawness).

• Dante Alighieri — a lifelong touchstone; Heaney even translated parts of The Inferno.

• Virgil — The Aeneid and especially The Georgics (Heaney’s translation The Aeneid: Book VI is a tribute).

Other Inspirations & Influences

Irish myth & folklore (Ulster Cycle, Cú Chulainn tales).

The bog body photographs of P.V. Glob’s The Bog People).

Modern poets he has written about: Philip Larkin, Osip Mandelstam, Joseph Brodsky.

How to read him:

If you’re new to Heaney, I’d start with Death of a Naturalist (early voice), North (pivotal), Seeing Things (visionary), and Human Chain (late work). Then dip into his prose (Preoccupations or The Redress of Poetry) to hear his voice as a critic and essayist. Stepping Stones, a series of interviews, is one of my favourites.

Take Your Writing Further: Write With Purpose

For those interested, I’m sharing a masterclass on Writing With Purpose (how to bring depth and meaning into your writing) later this month. Waitlist here for details.

Mini-Series: Lessons From Great Writing

If you’ve just joined this mini-series, you can also read:

• Intro: Why Writers Learn Best By Reading Deeply

• #1: Lessons from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: Wonder, Simplicity & Purpose

Over the coming weeks I’m featuring the work of writers that have been important to me - both as a reader and novelist - and I break down the lessons I learned from reading their work. I share resources or exercises for you to follow up on each session, so you can build up a toolkit of Writing Resources to help with your own creative writing practice. Next week, I’ll be writing about Gabriel García Márquez and how he shaped my fiction writing. Join us!

What are some of your favourite books, the ones that sparked your own desire to write? Why?

If you’ve found this helpful and want to follow along with this series, sign up for free weekly insights into storytelling. And if you’re interested in different storytelling models that go beyond the hero’s journey — a previous post Do We Still Need Heroes?breaks down global storytelling models and how to apply them in your writing.

Until next week,

Laura

Laura McVeigh

Author | Travel Writer | Storyteller

lauramcveigh.com | lauramcveightravel.com | travel-writing.com |

Laura McVeigh is a Northern Irish novelist and travel writer. Her internationally bestselling writing has been widely translated. She has authored books for Lonely Planet, DK Travel, bylines in Irish Times, Irish Independent and her writing has been featured in BBC, Newsweek, New Internationalist and many more. Former CEO of a global writers’ organisation working with writers from 145 countries, Laura is founder of Travel-Writing.Com and Green Travel Guides. She works with writers, founders, and sustainable brands on storytelling. Laura also writes weekly on writing, travel writing and green travel on Substack.

P.S. If you love travel writing, check out Write Your Way Around The World : start with this Think You’re Not a Travel Writer? Think Again post (and you can download my free masterclass on how to get started travel writing, or grab your copy of the Travel Writer’s Starter Kit). And if you enjoy mindful travel, The Green Travel Guide has you covered.