The short version: To write at length turn off your inner editor.

The long version:

Why the problem writing long form?

Writing at length is a completely different kettle of fish from writing shorts. I am absolutely hopeless in short form. However to become adept at either type of writing takes commitment and effort. I always had the point of view that a long form piece would allow me to mask weak bits with a large tapestry of generally okay bits and few superb bits.

Actually, to write in long form you have to cut out all the poor and mediocre bits and aim to have as much of it be "good day" writing as it possibly can be. What this tells us is that you are smarter than I am because you didn't have to write about nine novels to get to the point where you realised that some of this stuff just wasn't cutting it.

Regarding Plans

You say you plan everything, and this is great news. One thing I have learned is to plan everything. I learned this from the smoking wreckage of a number of novels varying in length between 30k - 80k where I planned nothing. Writing a story is like drawing a circle freehand. Small scale some imprecision can creep in but it's fairly easy to correct and, with some practice, can be minimised. Then you move to freehanding a slightly larger circle and so on and so forth.

The only problem is that, human anatomy being what it is, the freehand circle can only be what it is to a certain scale without assistance. Try to repeat the process for the largest feasible freehand circle that your hand is capable of drawing for something ten times bigger and you'll end up with a broken looped spiral. Panic sets in as you realise the impossibility of the task in the old way.

Now the circle analogy breaks down. With some carefully prepared guides a single path may be described freehand to an adequate quality. This would be equivalent to making a plan and then sticking to it. In the world of maths that's fine, but in reality things are not so convenient. This is where the second important lesson must be learned:

Plan everything on paper that's easily burned.

No matter what your plan will change as you write. When you plan your characters will perform plot actions without complaint, the logic of their actions - broadly - will seem unassailable. However, when trying to flesh out event A you will necessarily corrupt a character's motivation to do the thing described in event C. These little niggles of logic, plot holes, will come back to haunt you, present you with the daunting prospect that you may never finish this work because every step forward increases the length of the journey by another ten steps, seemingly ad infinitum.

In the first instance this is good news.

Editing

Write, rewrite, wrestle with the problems, sew up the plot holes, explore the tangents, think about the character arcs, produce 120k of turgid, meandering, rubbish.

After this, get the scissors out.

The novelist starts like an artist with a blank canvas but, after the first draft has left a hideous mess of randomness in a heap all over their consciousness begins a shift into a mode more like a sculptor or explorer. The text can be combed over, the worst examples of logic defying weirdness ripped out, re-written, re-shaped to fit into the shape that the completed work should be.

Draft one is indulgent gluttony, draft two is spartan dietary discipline, fat must be trimmed.

Some Practical Advice

Perhaps the easiest way to turn off the inner editor is to take a story that is very broad, like a folk-tale or a fairy story, and try to write it with actual characters who do what they do in the story for some inner human reason.

It's no less problematic to think of an empathetically sound motivation for Cinderella's wicked stepmother be mean to Cinderella because Cinderella is a much cherished part of the cultural idiom instead of something you made up yesterday. After all every person is the hero of their own story so how can the Wicked Stepmother sleep at night with her stepdaughter sleeping in rags on a mat before the hearth? Also, why does Cinderella's father allow this treatment of his daughter? What is that all about?

It doesn't take too long thinking about simple stories in this manner before you find yourself re-writing popular stories as 80k books because you suddenly realise that the standard version tells you the stepmother was wicked but does not explain why, or what that implied when set against the other events in the story.

Once you understand that other people's stories are no more coherent than your own appear to you perhaps you might be inclined to give yourself a break in the act of creating stuff in the first place. Also you must understand that after that first act of creation you are nowhere near finished, so don't sit back and heave a sigh of relief, the hard work only starts once you have all the material gathered together in the first place.

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