So what you’re saying is that when you see a word, you’re able to know what it means and how it’s read, but when you wanna remember the word for yourself you can’t recall it? Is that it?
If so, it’s perfectly fine. This is called recognition vs recall. WK teaches the former (u see the kanji and u identify it), while writing kanji by hand would be a recall process. That’s why you didn’t do as well with Kaniwani. Recalling is a harder process than recognition. The WK team chose to put aside the recalling process because writing kanji is a very rare thing to do, even if you’re living in Japan, not to mention that it’s harder and it would delay your general progress on kanji.
I’d recommend you to read Chapter 3 of my Guide for Wanikani to understand a bit more of this 
My Journey of 368 days (+ The Ultimate Guide for WK 📖 ) - #2 by jprspereira