Specific, Not Traceable — A Self-Training Module

Specific, Not Traceable

A self-training module in two units

Ted Sablay

The whole module rests on one idea: specificity and identifiability are two separate dials. Specificity is concrete, sensory detail — the thing that makes a stranger feel it. Identifiability is the set of facts that point at a real person — the thing that gets someone hurt. Power lives in the first dial. Risk lives in the second. Your habit is to turn both down at once, which protects people and kills the song. The skill is to turn the first up and the second down. Unit 1 trains that. Unit 2 trains the candor you can spend freely, because it costs no one but you.
Unit 1

Specific but Disguised

The principle. What makes a line land is never the name. It’s the letter left on the counter, the porch light on for a year, the exact hour. You can keep every one of those and still change who they belong to. Protect people by changing the facts that identify them, never by blurring the details that move people.

Learn to see it — Detail vs. Tag

DETAIL · keep

Sensory, concrete, does the emotional work. An object, a gesture, a room, the weather, the specific action.

TAG · change

Identifying. A name, a place, a job, a date, a relationship, a physical marker, a fact only they would recognize.

“My sister wrote him a letter and was gone before he got home.”
Tags: “sister,” any real name or town. Details: the letter, gone before he got home.
Disguised: “She left the letter on the counter and was gone by the time he came in.” Every detail survives. Nobody is named. It lands exactly as hard.

The Two-Pass Method

  1. Truth pass (for your eyes only). Write it completely true — real names, real everything, as raw and specific as it was. Don’t censor. This draft is never shown to anyone.
  2. Disguise pass. Change only the tags. Keep every detail untouched. If you feel the urge to soften a detail to hide someone, stop — change a tag instead. You never pay with a detail.

The disguise toolkit

  • Rename / un-name — pronoun or invented name.
  • Relocate — move the town, the room, the state.
  • Recast — change job, age, gender, relationship.
  • Composite — merge two people, or split one.
  • Time-shift — move the decade or season.
  • Refract — tell it from a stranger’s point of view.

The two-question litmus test

  1. Could a stranger picture this? If no, you cut a detail. Put one back.
  2. Could the real person prove it’s them? If yes, change one more tag.

Done when the answer is yes to the first and no to the second.

Drills — repeat until automatic

  • A. Take a true memory. Write three gutting concrete details. List every tag. Rewrite keeping all three details, changing all tags.
  • B. Steal the scene, change the coat. Keep the emotional spine and one killer detail; change who, where, and when until it’s unrecognizable.
  • C. Composite practice. Merge two real people into one character. Notice the truth survives the merge.
  • D. The “prove it” audit. Hand the disguised line to the imagined subject. Keep changing tags until they can’t prove it’s them — without touching a single detail.
Change the face. Keep the scar.
Unit 2

Candid Without Casualties

The principle. Your own interior is yours to reveal. When you go abstract about your own feelings, nobody else is protected — you’re only protecting yourself. That candor is fully available, at zero cost to anyone else. You just have to stop flinching from it.

Learn to see it — Whose skin is this?

SOMEONE ELSE

Revealing it exposes another person. → Disguise it (Unit 1).

ONLY ME

Revealing it exposes only you. → Go all the way. There is no one to protect.

Your habit is to guard your own skin as if it were someone else’s. It isn’t. Bare it.

The candor ladder

Every feeling can be written at four depths. You default to the top. Push each one down at least one rung.

L0The label. “It’s terrifying.” Abstract. Where you usually stop.
L1The body. What it did to you physically. “My hands wouldn’t hold the phone.”
L2The unflattering thought. The thing you’d rather not admit. “Part of me hoped no one would answer.”
L3The action. What you actually did. “I hung up twice before I let it ring.”

Candor lives at 1, 2, and 3. None of them names or implicates anyone but you.

Two techniques

  • Show the symptom, not the diagnosis. Don’t tell me you were anxious; show the specific thing anxiety made you do. The symptom is yours alone and exposes no one.
  • Confess the unflattering one. The feelings you abstract are usually the ones that don’t make you look good — resentment, need, envy, fear, the pettiness. Nobody is implicated by your own worst feeling. Write the line you’d be a little embarrassed to sing.

Drills — repeat until automatic

  • E. Take a feeling you’d normally write as a label. Push it down all three rungs — body, thought, action. Keep the lowest one.
  • F. Unflattering inventory. List the feelings you had in a real situation that you’d rather not admit. Turn one into a line. Notice it exposes only you.
  • G. Whose-skin sort. Label each vulnerable line in a verse ME or THEM. For every ME, ask: did I go all the way, or did I flinch? Rewrite the flinches.
  • H. Sing the embarrassing one. Each session, write one line you’d be a little scared to have someone hear — about you and only you.
Protect them. Expose me.

Weekly Practice

  • One Two-Pass rewrite a week: a true draft turned into a disguised draft.
  • One candor-ladder push per session: drop a feeling down a rung on the spot.
  • Two notebooks: a Details book (images, objects, gestures caught in life) and a Confessions book (unflattering true feelings). Your raw stock.

You’ve Got It When

  • You can tag every fact in a line DETAIL or TAG on sight.
  • Your first instinct on a sensitive story is “how do I change the tags,” not “how do I make it vaguer.”
  • You catch yourself flinching from your own feeling and push past it — because there’s no one behind that flinch but you.