Does it really turn out to be as easy as Heisig says? I mean, sometimes I just try making up stories for a kanji randomly (I'm still at the point where stories are given to you) and I come up with nothing.

I don't know about others, but I borrow about 99.9% of my stories from this site.

http://kanji.koohii.com/study

Yeah I prefer a lot of user submitted stories found on this site but sometimes they don't click very well or are not formatted how I like them. ( Keyword in beginning of story ) so I switch it around. Even for the stories Heisig gives you some of them are just boring or confusing while the user submitted version is perfect (for me).

But yes I have made a few of my own stories for them. But only a couple here and there. Collectively this site is very accomplished.

It depends. Sometimes stories are easy to make up, sometimes they are quite hard. Also, the user submitted ones may or may not work perfectly for you - for instance, "Mr T" doesn't work for me at all and is extremely common, so a lot of the user stories don't work. So I end up having to make a lot of my own. It's not too hard usually, but I'd be lying if I said it was a cake walk the whole time.

At around 800ish (on 1000 atm) I just stopped making up my own stories and relied solely on this site Some of the user submitted stories are just too good to pass up.

It does get alot easier, but using the ones on the site is even easier than that, and as people have said, some of them are too good to ignore.

Well it completely depends on the keywords and your ability to create an image with them. Some of Heisig's keywords are rather stiff and made it very hard, for me atleast, to remember (cornucopia, esquire etc.). A lot of the time you're better of using the stories the users submitted.