I’m a writer who believes fervently that less is more in just about every aspect of writing a novel. Nothing you write will ever beat the magic movie machine that is your readers’ imaginations, and the more you let your reader infer, imagine, and guess at what lies behind stuff, the better your universe, characters, and mechanics will be.
Not every writer agrees, of course, and some of them are extremely successful. Some writers want to invent languages with complex grammars and extensive vocabularies. Or write book-length histories that will never be published. In other words, some writers are Method and want to have all this stuff under the surface that informs their work. That’s fine, but it’s not me, and if it’s not you, you have to be honest with yourself. The problem we all run up against is that the folks who believe more is, well, more are often the ones that get all the attention.
Seems Like Work
I’ll admit to being jealous of the folks who can invent languages and adapt existing religions into a wholly new form for their novels, but I’m also not very interested in doing so—unless those things are the point of the story I’m telling. When it comes to languages, specifically, I prefer to invent a few words, hint at a grammar, and leave it at that. In fact, for almost all the details of world-building I prefer to use hints and shadows instead of details and pages and pages of detail.
Part of this is admitting that you have to write the stuff that excites you and not the stuff that bores you, because your attitude towards your own material will come off the page like radiation. The other part is the diminishing returns of details: At first your reader will be excited to learn about the fundamentals of your universe, but familiarity breeds contempt, and if you don’t withhold some of the information you run the risk of your reader seeing you behind the curtain madly pulling levers, and the magic is gone.
The TL;DR version is: Don’t force yourself to do world-building work you don’t want to. It’s never worth it.
This applies to household chores, too, which is why I turned my crawlspace into one huge cat litter box. It’ll be years before I have to burn this place down, change my name, and start over.