Just wondering what the accepted protocol for writing the narrator's thoughts is? Is it just to italicise them, rather than using 'I thought' 'he thought', etc, which feels a little clumsy.

Michelle

No, you don't normally italicise them. Either use 'I thought' or just slide into them, in free indirect style:

The bus was late, and then took forever to crawl up the hill. I saw an old woman standing waiting as we crept towards her; she looked as if she was going to collapse. How stupid the council was,[I thought,] putting those roadworks there! Surely they could see that it made all this traffic, and just in the pre-Christmas rush? When we got to the stop the doors opened, but she couldn't manage to haul herself on. "D'you want a hand, love?" the spotty teenager asked. Whatever would Mum have thought, [I mused]? She was always convinced that anyone with a backwards baseball cap was about to bash you over the head with a baseball bat.

Emma

If it's obviously from that character's pov then you shouldn't need 'I thought' or 'he thought', because the reader should be inside their heads already.

Thanks Emma and NMott

I often miss them out altogether...I just put them in as internal mono.
It doesn't seem to confuse.
HB x

I'd say it depends to some extent upon how 'close' you are to the character who is expressing the narrative point of view. If you are very close up, especially if you are using the first person 'I', hardly any tags of the 'I wondered' 'he thought' variety should be necessary. As you point out they can seem a bit clunky. But if there is a little more distance between author and POV character, just launching into the indirect style risks seeming to be an affectation. The problem is that using too many such tags always sounds stodgy. Perhaps the best approach is to use a tag in the first sentence of 'thinking' in a paragraph or section then let the remaining sentences use indirect speech/thought. This avoids any confusion as to whether it is the author or the character doing the thinking, while dispensing with excessive clunkiness.

Chris

I'd say it depends to some extent upon how 'close' you are to the character who is expressing the narrative point of view. If you are very close up, especially if you are using the first person 'I', hardly any tags of the 'I wondered' 'he thought' variety should be necessary.

Yes, it's about Gardner's psychic distance, isn't it:

1) It was winter of the year 1853. A large man stepped out of a doorway.
2) Henry J. Warburton had never much cared for snowstorms.
3) Henry hated snowstorms.
4) God how he hated these damn snowstorms.
5) Snow. Under your collar, down inside your shoes, freezing and plugging up your miserable soul...

Depends where you are on that scale, whether a direct quote of their thoughts needs a 'he thought' or not...

Emma