龍 (Ryū) — The More You Count Its Sixteen Strokes, the Harder It Becomes

龍 Is a Character You Cannot Write by Counting

龍, the dragon, has sixteen strokes. The everyday form, 竜, has ten, and that is the standard character in daily use. But when someone asks me to entrust a name or a work with force and rising fortune, the character they choose is almost always the older, fuller 龍. The extra strokes give it weight and rank. It began as a pictograph of a single creature — a crowned head, a coiling body, rows of scales — climbing into the sky. So 龍 is not a character to seat quietly on the page; it holds the air of something about to move. And yet, if you approach those sixteen strokes as sixteen separate tasks, counting your way through one line at a time, you will not be able to write it. By the first stroke your hand is already worrying about the white space fifteen strokes away, and it shrinks. When I began, I braced myself in front of high-stroke characters and each line went stiff, one after another. I could only write the dragon once I stopped counting.

See the Sixteen Strokes as Four Blocks

I see 龍 not as sixteen strokes but as four blocks. First I split the character down the middle. The left is a half-body stacked vertically, the right another — two towers standing side by side. The left tower is two tiers: 立 above, the flesh radical 月 below. The right tower is a small stroke at the top, then three horizontal lines running beneath it. Once I have divided it into these four blocks, I only need to breathe between them. Inside a block the brush does not stop; at the seam between blocks it takes one breath. Trying to write all sixteen strokes in a single run, the breath fails and the lines scatter. Split into four, each block is only four or five strokes — that, the hand can hold. Match the height of the two towers, leave a slight gap, and set them facing each other. Once that skeleton is decided, the dragon is half written. The full stroke order lives on the kanji dictionary page for 龍, set beside the everyday 竜.

Don't Level the Horizontals — Force Comes from Unevenness

The part of 龍 that collapses most easily is the run of horizontal lines at the lower right. Once, writing 龍 large for a commission — one character on a half-sheet, 35 by 68 cm — I set those horizontals as evenly and equally as if drawn with a ruler. The character came out orderly. Too orderly: it went flat, and the rising force I wanted was nowhere in it. After discarding more than ten sheets, I understood that the dragon's power comes from unevenness. Rewriting, I tightened the intervals at the top, opened them below, and made each line a different length. Simply abandoning even spacing let layers of air form inside the character, and the scales began to ripple. One more thing: the right side is dense and drinks ink. Before entering the right tower I always reload the brush. If the ink runs out here, the very part I most want to show goes dry and loses its force — though on some days I let that dryness stand as force itself. Which to choose, I decide by how the ink is sitting on that day's paper. On the rhythm of the brush itself, I wrote in why brushwork is decided by speed. However many strokes there are, it all returns to the momentum of a single line running through each block.

龍 has sixteen strokes. But the more you brace and count, the less you can write it. Divide it into four blocks, breathe between them, and let the right-side horizontals run uneven instead of level. When you stop counting and run the hand block by block, the character finally takes on the air of a creature climbing, right now, into the sky.