Does your work ever just feel so contrived?

One remedy might be not to start writing at the beginning. Try drafting a story starting with just one scene somewhere in the middle. One scene or event that made you want to write it in the first place, while it's still fresh in your mind. Then branch out from that forward and backward, like a growing seed crystal. Or even write the ending first. The plot contortions you need to get from the beginning to where you are when you started writing might require events that are by necessity less contrived

Fiction writing is a constant struggle for the writer to convince readers that what you have contrived is not contrived.

+1 to that

Sometimes I put things in my MSs that seem like I'm just putting them in because I want them to be there. But usually by the time I've actually written the entire book, I understand why I thought certain things needed to be there - even if I wasn't sure about it at the time.

Because an outline won't really show you all the nuances of your characters it can be hard to judge whether sequences of events feel contrived or not. Putting it into the context of the manuscript as a whole will show you where things really don't work. And then you can fix those things. But trying to determine whether it's too contrived for Ned to miss the bus and wind up meeting a wizard while walking to to work isn't going to be completely clear until you write the scenes before and after it, before you really get to know both Ned and the wizard.

(And that doesn't mean that you should ignore the feeling that something doesn't fit while outlining. But, if it falls into the "this is obvious" or "this is stupid" category, try writing a bit more of the chapters and seem if that feeling remains. My brain does a lot of work on plotting that I am never aware of. As a result things I think I came up with on the fly and seem out of place are frequently part of a larger, more complex plot than I realized.)