People repeatedly tell me to write simply. Some complain when I don't, and some say they dislike complex writing.
I thought that, back in the 19th century, many people liked sophisticated prose. Why, nowadays, do people prefer simple prose? Is writing simply the only way to reach many readers? If I write simply and plainly, will people take me more seriously?
For starters: Nobody can force you to write in a style you do not like. You are the artist. You decide about your art. There are people who like cubism and others like naturalism. If you are an impressionist, would you change painting the way you see the world?
If you ask for a reason: I think the cause is our language "simplified or streamlined" a lot and also educational levels play a role. You can take a piece of Shakespearean literature and be amazed by the rhythm, wording and content, but the style nowadays is not for everyone - but there are still fans for this. You can also watch a today's poetry slam and feel the same amazement - and yet there are others who tell you that this is trash and not poetry.
Who is right? Nobody is right. Everybody just has an opinion about things. And the only opinion that counts here, is your opinion about your art. Do you like what you do? Don't change a thing of what you endorse. You fear of being unsuccessful? Keep doing and evolving your style until success kisses you. Some day it will. For the meantime, have a backup plan.
Do not be what others want you to be. Be you and find those who like this.
The taste of the masses (and I'm not condescending here — I'm part of it!) is not sophisticated but simple. That is true in literature, music, film, paintings and all other art as well. People have read the cheapest kind of pulp fiction ever since the rotary printing press made pocket books and magazines affordable. That market is huge: 1.5 billion copies of the German weekly Perry Rhodan SF series (which I read as a pre-teeen for a while) have been printed. That dwarfs any Nobel prize book by many orders of magnitude.
What may have changed is that what we call "published opinion" is not the prevailing opinion any more. Like in politics, the "manufacturing of public opinion" has been thoroughly democratized. Social media may have played a role as well as a relativistic approach to culture: Who is the arbiter of what is good and what is bad if not the consumers? 50 years ago educated people looked down on pulp fiction; if they read it, they didn't talk about it. Today, people are more self-confident. They drink sweet wines and read what they want and elect whom they want, proudly.
A similar development occurred in linguistics: 100 years ago an educated elite held court over proper language use. There was right and wrong. Along came descriptivism which did away with the defining power of the educated and made everybody their own arbiter of right and wrong.
The taste for the simple and easy is not new, in no realm. But it is expressed more publicly and with greater self-confidence.
(kudos to @LukeSawczak for pointed this out in the comments)
To take a recent example; Martha Well's Murderbot Daries is a recent, popular sci-fi series. It is probably representative of current mainstream, mass market prose. The prose is reasonably "simple."
Here's the opening line:
I could have become a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module, but then I realized I could access the combined feed of entertainment channels carried on the company satellites.
Wells does a fantastic job of establishing both her main Character and her Voice. The writing is sarcastic and cynical, but still fun to read. This is sophisticated. The character comes across as both alien and deeply human, and again this represents sophistication.
The author engages with a bunch of weighty themes, including: the way egalitarianism feels naive in the face of aggressive capitalism, the way that neuro-divergence leads to isolation and how one can connect deeply with others in spite of it, gender nonconformity, etc.
Doing this while remaining light, and fun, and engaging, without feeling preachy, while building a sci-fi world of space flight and alien planets is hard. As an aspiring sci-fi writer it just blows my mind.
This represents an absolute mastery of so many critical aspects of the Art of Writing. It truly is sophisticated.
And a seventh grader could follow the prose, because it's simple.
In most mass market writing, things like Voice and Characterization are the driving factor in the writing style. This can often lead to simple sentence structure, because concentrating on rhythm or rhyme or purple prose can distract from what the author is trying to accomplish.
But some genres value different things. I would argue that both hip hop music and literary fiction are modern genres of writing where complicated allusions and metaphors and intricate callbacks to previous sentences and purple prose are valued.
So it is possible that OP's style lends itself to a genre that they are not currently targeting. It is also possible, since these styles are not as main stream, that OP is writing perfectly good literary fiction, but the Beta readers are expecting mass market fiction and critiquing accordingly.
I'd argue that these points apply even more strongly in non-fiction.
In, for example, academic writing, sophistication is demonstrated by the strength of the ideas and the precision with which the author can express them. Clarity is a hard requirement; publications have strict word counts.
Academic writing is "hard" for lay people because academics create their own technical languages to better express nuance, and outsiders aren't necessarily familiar with the terms. (This applies to many other fields as well - engineering and business both famously have their own opaque lexicons as well.)
The further you get from Writing-as-Art the harder it will be to justify anything other than concise, effective prose.
Again, it is possible that OP's intended style and OP's intended genre don't match.
I see three options: change the style, change the genre, or forge ahead and just do Weird Art That Makes You Happy.
Part of the reason for verbosity in the past was that serialized publication often paid by the word. With that as the payment metric authors are simply going to use more words to say the same thing.
The highest and most accomplished skill in writing is to compose elegant and at the same time simple sentences.
Convoluted prose is mostly written by inexperienced writers who refuse to structure their disorganized thinking into a linear narrative and who confuse syntactic complexity with sophistication.
If the majority of readers struggle to fight through the incomprehensible thicket of one writer's prose, then he is a lazy writer.
The availability of cartoons and graphics these days results in most people having no patience for long words or lots of them.
But even in "earlier times," one had to choose: write to impress or write to be understood.
There are probably things way more sophisticated than A Tale of Two Cities, but I don't read muchImagine someone who wanted to direct short films, admit they never watch old movies; hearing someone aspire to be a chef say they don't go to culinary school and only eat frozen meals; an amateur painter who doesn't visit galleries showing the art of old masters... then read that someone wants to be a writer but doesn't read much. You can't become skilled at anything in the Arts if you don't listen to music, look at paintings, watch movies, taste homemade dishes or read the classics.