: Re: How long should I mention an injured character’s pain? My main character gets shot and survives. One thing that bothers me is a character who is injured and keeps going like the energizer

@Cody1607638

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People in good health and top physical shape actually can shrug off a surprising amount of damage, especially when they're in a fight/flight situation. Pain becomes more important later when they're trying to get on with their normal comings and goings. You can get a lot of millage out of the bruised and/or broken state of a recovering character as they realise just how badly injured they got in a fight where they thought they got off lightly. This usually takes the form of things like wincing when they reach for things and discover that they've pulled muscles or kissing someone and realising that their lips have been bruised and/or cut on their teeth somewhere along the line.

When it comes to real serious wounds it's a bit different though, they take a lot of time and many narratives don't include otherwise empty time; there seem to be two approaches that are taken most often:

lose time, skipping over large spans of recovery time allows you to have characters back in fighting shape reasonably without boring your audience with too many of the details. This can as little as a few hours or it can be months depending on the needs of the story and the character. I've even read a couple of series where the protagonist spends almost all the time between books in a hospital of one kind or another, in one case this is several years of psychiatric care.
focus on the character's recovery, as Galastel points out stories can in fact be driven by the recovery of an incapacitated character. This lets you focus on the wounded character just about as much as you like but tends to force you into using either a third person or a first person peripheral point-of-view when your main character is laid out for an extended period.

However you handle the situation you need to make sure that you're pushing the story along, time should be shown to pass, and events should continue accordingly. Also unless they are pushed into drastic efforts and/or are in drastic conditions people will heal so mentions of pain and injury should show a recovery under way or point to deterioration due to drastic circumstances.

Old wounds can also get mentioned reasonably often without being disruptive to the narrative. Such as characters noting the way old breaks to bones still ache in cold weather and others noting their scars for example.

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