Characters (And Me)

So, current word count is sitting at 2631.

Sitting pretty at about five pages I've so far introduced my three main protagonists. The problem that I seem to have (besides pacing) is trying to make characters that are both believable and not so mary-sueish. Another issue is the fact where I'm trying to include several clichés and somehow manage to make it original. I'm also worried about the fact that I may be too influenced by things I read and my story comes out sounding like something I have read, thus making it slightly plagerised.

The prophecy has been done a gazillion times, in fact it pretty much seems to be a requirement for fantasy novels, so when I decided to use it for my main male protagonist I wasn't sure if it would add to his perfectness. Plus I always get worried when writing male characters because I have a hard enough time grasping female thought processes without having the added struggle of pausing and asking myself: "What would a guy do in this situation?"

Female characters are different, mostly I try to keep their emotional responses fairly normal because I had a tendancy when I was younger to have my heroines have huge moodswings and thus my stories would read like a soap opera and bad writing than an actual story. It was unbelievable and continues to make me cringe to this day. But this time I am detemined to get my characters right.

The book I'm reading to help me along with that is the Complete Idiot's Guide to Writing A Novel. Yeah, I know. Some of it is vaguely helpful but as for the rest... I'm not entirely sure yet. I haven't been a big believer in how good my writing is and so far I've hit another slump in regards to where my story is going but that's more of a pacing issue than anything else? How quickly should I start to get into the story. How many chapters should I wait before I bring in the main point? Those sorts of things. But I guess I need to write a bit more in order to flesh things out. And work on that whole "show not tell" aspect of writing that sometimes eludes me.

In any case, enough procrastinating on the story writing!