Through extended practise I’ve made a lot of progress with teh quality of my Japanese handwriting.
In previous Heisig attempts I was careful to always have pencil and paper ready for all kanji reviews I did on the “Reviewing the Kanji” site [1] so I could practise writing them. I would inevitably be unhappy with my first attempt at the character, and would try one or two more times. Today I just traced them on the desk in front of me. The result is I finished the reviews faster, but more importantly at no point did I get hung up on how well I’d written each character.
Heisig cautions against writing out the characters many times when learning or reviewing them, as this only reinforces in your mind (perhaps subconsciously) the old idea that you need to write the characters over and over in order to learn them. By simply tracing you free yourself from worrying about form and in doing so you save time.
Since writing is so important, I’d recommend practising every day but don’t lapse into the habit of repeatedly writing characters; if you learn a character this way then there’s little chance of you being able to use it effectively later on when building stories based on it.