Injuring Characters: How much is too much?

When we talked about realistic injuries, I mentioned briefly how some people over-injure their characters. Instead of going into it on that post, I said that it was a topic for another time. That time is today.

Before starting writing this, I did a Google search with the words “How often should I injure my characters?” When that failed to bring up any satisfactory results, I switched around the words, used only certain words without any proper sentence structure, tried more specific questions and came up with—

Oh, you guessed.

—absolutely nothing.

I found several pages worth of why you should hurt your characters, how to write realistic injuries, how to describe hurt characters, how to deepen characters through injuries, and many other things, but I didn’t come across how often you should injure your characters. Maybe Google just doesn’t like me today, or maybe I picked the wrong words…