Gone on way too long

Here's a question: Am I doing something wrong?

I've been writing for almost twenty years now. I'm still trying to get the hang of it, which means I subscribe to a lot of blogs and newsletters giving hints and tips for aspiring writers. One of the things you see coming up over and over again is the question of how to trim down a story or script that is far too long. People have issues with their 300,000 word novels and their 165 page screenpages. My question is... how are you producing anything of that length in the first place?

To date, I think the longest thing I've ever written was about 130,000 words, and that was years ago, before I learned how to edit. On average, my novel-length stories tend to come in somewhere between 50 to 90,000 words. The few screenplays I've tackled struggle to break 100 pages. This isn't boasting, it just seems to be what I'm comfortable with. Like the stories find their own natural length, if that's not too pretentious a way of putting it, and anything I do to drag them out makes them, well, dragged out.

So where do people find the fortitude to keep a story going for two or three times as many words? And why exactly can't I do the same?

Offhand, I suspect one of the problems is my attention span. I've always favoured short, concise books over lengthy tomes (notwithstanding the fact that Gormenghast is my favourite book in the world). I've got little or no patience for movies that go on for more than ninety minutes. (Oddly enough, I also have difficulties reading short stories, but that's probably a separate problem for a separate post.) So basically, I just don't have the mental energy to keep going with a story once it passes a certain length. Eventually I'll reach a point where I just go, "and then they went home, the end".

But you have to wonder whether there's something else that I'm fundamentally lacking in my writing. Are my plots too lightweight? Are the characters too flimsy? Is my inability to keep track of subplots and hence my dislike of including them holding me back? Realistically speaking, there have been a bunch of times when I could have used a story turning in at 10 or 20,000 words more than it did, simply so there was some leeway when it came to editing. Trimming out the suggested 10% from a first draft would mean the second draft ending up far shorter than anticipated... which means I have a disincentive to tighten up my flabby prose. And don't get me started on screenplays. Apparently my ideal length for a screenplay is about 80 pages, which is no use to anyone - far too long for a short film, too short for a feature.

So yes, in essence I'm somewhat jealous of people who can and do write these huge bloated epics, who have the ability to follow and expand a story into a trilogy or beyond. Or if not jealous then at least bemused by how they manage it.