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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/24858
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/24858
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Falling in love has the quality that you are often not fully conscious of it while it is happening. The moment where you articulate to yourself that you are in love with someone can often come as a surprise to you. (It is a common enough trope in movies and books that the best friend has to explain to the protagonist that what they are feeling is love.)

This all fits in well enough with your plan. But it becomes much more difficult when you write in the first person stream of consciousness style because first person narrative consists of the protagonist articulating their thoughts to the reader. How do you show the reader the signs of an emotions the hero has not yet articulated when you are recording the articulated thoughts of the hero?

Changing to a style in which the first person narrator reports their actions rather than their thoughts, or to a third person narrator, would give you more room to establish the telltale signs of falling in love.

But I think there is a second problem that you need to address. Contract killers are generally sociopaths (in literature and in life) and sociopaths don't fall in love. If you establish your character as a sociopath, then the revelation that they have fallen in love undermines that characterization. That transition will feel sudden because you have essentially thrown out the old character and replaced it with a new.

The standard literary approach to the killer-turned-lover story, therefore, is to establish through the story why someone who is not a sociopath has become a killer. (Generally this involves brainwashing by some secret organization who exploits some childhood trauma to dehumanize their assassin in training.) The story then becomes a redemption story in which this conditioning is overcome, enabling the killer to fall in love like a normal human being.

In other words, in order to portray a convincing transformation from killer to lover, you first need to establish how they went from lover to killer. Maybe you can do that in a stream of consciousness narration, but if not, I would suggest trying a different narrative technique to see if it works better for you.

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