Some women with long hair (and nearly all with mid-length hair, down to about shoulder length) wash their hair every day. Once you hit mid-back lengths, washing every day starts to be problematic.
If your intended length is shoulder-length or above, you can wash every day with shampoo (just like short hair) but make sure to condition and use a gentle shampoo. Women going for these lengths can pretty much blow-dry and heat-style to their heart's content and do a limited amount of experimentation with colour (heavy bleaching, frequent colouring, chemical relaxing and perming are best suited for chin-length or above because they make hair stiff and brittle so you don't want a style with a lot of movement).
If you're going for below the shoulders down to about bra-strap length, you can usually still wash and condition every day, but blow-drying and heat-styling start to become an issue because of breakage. It's best to get it to the length you want first and then experiment with the heat stuff to see how much damage it does. Colouring needs to be rare and very gentle if you're going for these lengths - highlighting is fine, but drastic all-over colouring may not be, especially combined with any amount of heat styling or blowdrying.
If you're going for mid-back or longer, you have to cut out nearly all heat styling and possibly avoid daily washing. Some women going for these lengths wash every other day or even less frequently and rinse with water or conditioner on the days they don't wash; others use conditioner only to clean their hair (this is possible, but you need a particular type of conditioner, and it tends to take longer).
As far as what to do with your hair if you're not washing/blowdrying/styling every day: short hair can just be rinsed, towel/airdried, and styled. When it's long enough, you can put it up damp (there are lots of possible updos, braids, etc). The only women I know of who keep a style overnight are black women, who have different hair from the type I'm familiar with and wear it in different (more structured) styles that keep better overnight. They tend to wear various headwraps, use satin pillowcases, and even so have to tweak the style in the morning if it's not a very tightly braided type. If you're black, you probably should check with a stylist with experience with African hair types because virtually everything is different and varies significantly with your individual hair texture.
