I am still chewing through this following excerpt of an article by Adam Thirlwell. There is a lot of meat for an author like myself who writes the whole damn novel following characters to see what will happen. I ponder the more intellectual and creative revelations at the edit stage.

I do know that when I take the time to sit and just think about the thoughts I am having they are overwhelmingly banal, common place, and dealing with the day I'm living through. On the other hand, I have also imagined that if my thoughts ever interacted like certain chemical compounds, my head would explode.

I also think that I strive for (and am most comfortable with) the "disguised first-person narrative." However, I don't really know what it is. At least I think I don't know.

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The problem is that, once a thought is written down, it loses all its character. The essence of a thought is its fragility. "For many of our sensations," added Dostoevsky, "when translated into ordinary language seem absolutely unreal. That is why they never find expression, though everyone has them."
I paused on this unreality. And I was overtaken by proprietary pride in the art of the novel.
In an essay, I once wrote about how Franz Kafka invented a strange style in his novels about this man he called K: where, although it looks like a third-person narrative, it is in fact a disguised first-person narrative, belonging to K. And suddenly I thought that I understood more precisely why Kafka wanted to do this. It was a way of inventing a subterfuge, so that he could be true to the cloudiness of thoughts. In a diary entry, on January 12 1911, Kafka noted how he hadn't been writing much, partly because he was lazy, true, but also "because of the fear of betraying my self-perception". Because, he continued, if a thought cannot be written down "with the greatest completeness, with the incidental consequences, as well as with entire truthfulness" - which it couldn't - then what was written down would replace the vague thought "in such a way that the real feeling will disappear while the worthlessness of what has been noted down will be recognised too late". This is why Kafka needed to write in the third person, while really describing the personal contours of a character's thoughts: it was a way of outwitting the imprecise solidity of language.
This is one technique in the art of the novel. Another, however, is to use the completeness and truthfulness of the third person, while still talking as if it's really you.
 
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But what is a thought? A thought is just a beginning. After all, even Kafka could be optimistic. Two years later, he was still worrying about the same thing. "When I say something it immediately and finally loses its importance, when I write it down it loses it too," he wrote, and then he added: "but sometimes gains a new one."
 
Article excerpt by Adam Thirlwell
 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2008/nov/08/adam-thirlwell