"You need to write. That's the only thing that will make your writing better. You're afraid to write something that's shit, that dishonors. But even Hemingway said, "The first draft of anything is shit." It's just a starting point. You have to get something down in the rough before you can perfect it.

Stories about your ancestors are what you should write. They engage your feelings because they mean something to you. You need to be emotionally engaged in your story. If you write about things that you don't feel about, you won't care about the material, and it will be gray, flat, and lifeless.
So start. Once you get your first draft, go back through and polish. Do it until you're happy with it. Walt Whitman, the famous poet, started writing Leaves of Grass at 37, and kept rewriting it to perfect it until he died at the age of 72. You don't have to publish it. You can keep it secret, and polish it until it shines with its own light.
But you have to get it on paper first. Here's what will happen: You will write, and a lot of it will be shit, and you will worry that you'll get run over a bus and someone will find it and know what a hack you are. But you ignore that inner perfectionist, because it'll keep you rewriting the first paragraph until it's perfect and you'll never get anywhere. You keep going until its done. You write the whole thing. And then, when you're finished, you read it.
You won't be happy with it. You'll cringe over the awkward sentences, the poor transitions, the pacing, blah blah blah. But you'll find these moments of beauty captured in words, like poetry, alive and breathing. And you'll move back a paragraph and build to that moment, and then the page will come alive, and you'll feel the rhythm of the words and how their energy leads into the next moment. And you'll struggle with the turn of a phrase that's not just right until, with a twist here and a tweak there, you realize you've captured one of life's secrets on the page, and you'll glory in it. You keep going like that. And every time you do, you'll feel your ancestors smile.
This is the way it's done. This is the way that it's always been done.

–Ira Glass