Nora Roberts doesn't chase a perfect first draft. She builds a book in three rounds, and she's laid the process out on her own site. Each draft has one clear job, which is a big part of how she keeps her output so steady.

The Direct Answer
She writes three drafts: a discovery draft, a layering pass, then a polish.
She's described this on her official blog, calling the first the hardest and the middle draft the happy part of the work. Source: 'Here's How I Work.'

Draft One: The Discovery Draft

The first pass is what Roberts calls the discovery draft, and she's said on her own site that it's the hardest part of the job. She doesn't work from a detailed outline. She keeps a loose mental map of where the story might go, then plows forward and gets the characters and the plot onto the page without stopping to fix what she's already written. This is the draft where she works out who these people are and why she'll want to spend hours with them every day for weeks. It's slow, messy going, and she's honest that it isn't the fun part.

I can fix a bad page. I can't fix a blank one.

Nora Roberts, USA Today, 1997

That line explains the whole approach to the first draft. At this stage she's after a complete draft, rough edges and all, and she saves the repairs for later. Everything wrong with it can be mended once the story exists end to end, which is exactly why she refuses to polish sentences while the shape of the book is still forming. The point of draft one is simply to have something on the page to work with. A finished rough draft gives her material. A blank document gives her nothing.

Drafts Two and Three: Layering and Polish

Once the story runs start to finish, Roberts goes back to page one. The second draft is where she reworks the language and repairs the weak spots, expanding thin scenes and cutting the dead ones as she goes. She's called this the happy middle of the work, the part where the book stops fighting her and starts to come together. Because the whole story already sits on the page, she can see its shape and layer in the detail that a fast first draft skips over. This is where a lot of the depth in her books gets built, once she knows the story holds together.

The third draft is the polish. Roberts goes through once more to smooth the sagging spots and sharpen whatever still reads flat, then runs a spell-check and sends the manuscript to her editor. Three passes, each with its own job, and a finished book at the end. The method is a big reason she can turn out several titles a year without losing quality along the way. It's repeatable, which matters more than it sounds. Because she isn't reinventing her process for every book, she can point that same three-draft engine at the next story and know roughly what each stage will ask of her.

This drafting rhythm sits inside a larger daily practice. See the full Nora Roberts writing routine for how the hours are structured.

What You Can Steal