Great work often feels simple because someone cared deeply about complexity beforehand.

What reads as effortless was usually produced by someone who dealt with all the complexity in advance so that you would not have to. The simple explanation came from a great deal of thinking, the clean design from many discarded versions. Simplicity on the surface is generally evidence of difficulty absorbed somewhere behind it.

When your own work is complicated, that may mean the hard thinking is still ahead of you rather than that the subject is inherently messy. Try explaining it to someone with no background. The places you cannot simplify are the places you have not yet worked out.