I’m not sure what is “normal”, but I can say that several Japanese stationery sets that I have gotten have blank paper for writing letters and a template sheet to place under the writing paper. The template has horizontal lines on one side and vertical lines on the other, which you can see through the writing paper and use to guide your writing.
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That is very interesting. I might have to find this somewhere.
Thank you very much!
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On several evening a week, I spend ~1 hour for writing. I got bored with just writing single words/kanjis, so I looked up a novel from 小説家になろう and just copy a 1-2 pages worth of text by hand. My main goal is not to actually practice writing specific kanji - more like I want to get back the muscle memory I used to have 10 years ago 
This wasn’t supposed to be a reply to GinAA— I don’t know how the erase it -_-
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I didn’t start handwriting kana/kanji until I entered university Japanese classes, but I have to say, it did help me a lot with retention.
It is a huuuge time suck though, so if you aren’t planning to live in Japan or try to achieve “native” fluency (which is such an ambiguous goal as it is), then I wouldn’t worry about handwriting to be honest.
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In a sense I agree with you. It is true, that if one aims to just learn speaking/listening, there is no point in practicing hanwriting. And if one aims to only achieve passive use (recognition, not producing kanji), handwriting is not that important either. I passed N1 without being able to handwrite almost any kanji from memory at the time. However, handwriting truly helps with retention and remembering vocabulary and compound words.
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I totally agree with you there!
Since I’m trying to reach a level of competency I can use in academia, I am practicing handwriting as well.
But I’m not sure if I would recommend it to many people who aren’t planning to use it on a daily basis.
Also, congrats on passing N1!
That’s quite the accomplishment.
I love handwriting, especially with fountain pens. Currently I have to handwrite some stuff here and there on a daily basis for work.
While actively studying Japanese in a course years ago, I did try to handwrite every kanji I was learning at the time. Sadly, I did not retain all of them, but a handful I can still write down from memory. At the time I was most proud of remembering how to write 曜 on paper. 
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I feel I don’t do enough handwriting.
Every lesson I handwrite the date and day on the top of the page in my notebook, so I have written this one approximately a million times!
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I can never get the proportions right for the tiny ヨs at the top, they always end up too big 
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I love handwriting because part of my love of Japanese is the script itself. It’s also definitely improved my ability to read other people’s handwriting because stroke order is so intuitive for me. In terms of retention, once you get used to stroke order handwriting doesn’t really have any additional benefits. As people have said it’s a lot of time to invest and pretty much every other aspect of learning Japanese has more value.
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A small sampling of my days of the week:
I think balance is all right on some of them, but none are very neat. At least I have the stroke orders down.
Also, I think I have seen those ョ’s in all different proportions in fonts and native handwriting, so I wouldn’t worry about it.
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I handwrite for doing genki practice exercises from the textbook and workbook. My handwriting is atrocious but it gets the job done. Same for my english (native lang) writing, it’s always been terrible and it’s a common joke among my friends.
Here’s a sample from some exercise I was doing
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This is what I do most of the evenings: copy novels by hand 
It is easy to see which kanjis are unfamiliar for me to write, since they tend to get much bigger than the others. I also add furigana for the words I wasn’t able to read correctly. I doubt I’ll ever review the page, but it helps me to keep checking the reading/translation as well and not just copy.
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Wow, what is this cool device?
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It’s a reMarkable tablet, an eink writing tablet that feels pretty close to paper. A little spendy but I use it a lot. I have workbook pdfs and such loaded on and can write over them as well.
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I had one of the those workbooks where you write each kanji 50x long ago, got about halfway to realize that this did nothing for my immediate goals at the time . Not time wasted though and at the very least, got used to stroke order. Nowadays, it’s usually for b-day/new years cards that I spend any time writing a letter or occasional note taking psycho-babble; it seems like a luxury study pleasure at this juncture and I could never keep all my note taking organized. I heard natives say non-native handwriting is recognizable. I’m guessing probably due to stroke order mistakes but could be other features too.
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As part of my Japanese classes (upper beginner / lower intermediate), we write essays (作文) on japanese essay template paper.
Also exams are in kana handwriting as we don’t use romaji at all in our classes.
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I read the title of this thread as “How much handwringing do you do…” and was going to say a LOT. But then…
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Haha - yes, I do that a lot too.