Not really; that's pretty much the point of the system. As you grow more familiar with kanji, the necessary steps for recall will decrease. Eventually, the keywords will fade as well, and it will just come across as "Japanese".

I agree with the other posters, that this is what if the final goal (you shouldn't be writing complete Japanese sentences later in life and have to remember your Heisig stories). But you should be careful of this happening too early on.

For simple kanji like 九 it's completely fine, but if you're still relatively early in your Heisig kanji studying (say, less than 3/4 in my opinion) you should be weary of forgetting your stories for the more complicated ones. Kanji that you knew before Heisig are also a bit of an exception to this, if you're pretty confident in your knowledge, but other kanji… at least for me, it tripped me up when I started forgetting my stories too early, and so I had to fail kanji that I really shouldn't have forgotten in the first place.

jankensan wrote:

Sometimes if i try to think of the story i forget how to write it, especially with characters I use regularly. 'hold', 'time' and 'write' are 3 examples of this. If I try to remember the story they just escape me. So my approach is to always try to write it automatically first, and think of the story if I need to. So far, this has worked great for me, just reached 680 though so it may not work later on...

Never solve a non-problem. The story is there for you, in case you forget how to write a kanji. But it is only a crutch and nothing more. If you don't need it to go straight from keyword to kanji, take it for granted, and don't try to fix something that isn't broken.