Too much and you become overwhelmed as a reader, and it makes it dull and lifeless. Too little and it seems like your characters are in a void, and two dimensional. Its another one of those writing rules isnt it? drop into a scene as late as possible, and depart as soon as you can. Dropping into the middle of the action, or even the middle of a story can give the writing great energy.

Its also different for different genres isnt it? Scifi and fantasy are the two toughies. Obviously scifi you need to create the specific world, whether it involve aliens, robots or corporate AIs, and with fantasy you need to generate a fantasy world (including no doubt, orcs, elves, dwarves and wizards) and making that fresh and exciting is difficult. But you still need the backstory there, dont you? Otherwise people cant connect.

I’ve always been a stickler for backstory. I do like to create the worlds of my characters. A lot of the time in intricate detail. But the thing i always find funny is that there is never any way for me to write that into the actual story, so the reader never gets to view the world at large. This I guess is a good thing. If you create the world and you have it all in your head, you dont need to explain it. The way your characters behave in the world will do all the explaining for you, right?