Writing descriptions is all very well, but no work of fiction is complete without dialogue. It doesn’t have to be incredible, it doesn’t have to be witty, it doesn’t have to be much – except that you have to be able to hear it. You have to able to have two characters, two characters that feel real, and you have to know that when you’re reading, or in my case writing, their conversation, you can actually hear two distinct voices in your head that make sense.
You wouldn’t think that would be such a hard thing to practice. It is though. I’ve realized lately that I love writing descriptions and indeed, I know I write them fairly well, at least well enough. But I don’t know, or rather haven’t attempted to know, how to write dialogue, and that’s bad. I need to learn how. The problem is that I can’t just practice dialogue for the sake of itself. I need to have a situation, characters, voices that I can clearly imagine.
I’m not managing to find a way to practice this. I might be obsessing over something silly, but I truly feel I need to learn to write believable conversations. And for that I’ll need people, stories. So that’s what I’m going to try to work on in the next few days.
Slightly Ignorant 
I’m the opposite. Dialog comes easier to me than description. Its a matter of using senses. When describing you use your sense of touch and inner sight. For dialog you need to listen.
I know, but the thing is I’m good at listening. I like listening. And I still am scared to death of writing conversations…
Maybe it would help if you tried talking to yourself and then writing it? Sometimes it’s easier to talk out loud! Lord knows I do enough of it! LOL!!
what about conversation reply? Take a conversation you’ve had with someone recently, and publish it… perhaps even just take an IM conversation, publish it, and see how that looks, read the flow and dialogue out of context… I can send you some of my IM’s if you want? It gives a nice “realistic” read… and then from there, you could try and copy the “style”?
You know, I was thinking about doing something like that. But the problem with internet conversations are that they have a very different flow to them – you can’t hear them like you hear real conversations.
I was thinking that as I posted the comment… and then I thought, well, you could use the IM conversations as a starting point… and change them to have a more “real life” feel?