You started off with one of the tougher materials to light by spark, at least from what I've seen during my experimentation with different tinders.

I've taken a MagFire, which produces an incredible shower of hot sparks, and couldn't get paper going. Granted, I knew it was going to be tough after reading a couple of posts here covering the very same subject, but I gave it a shot anyway.

I tried crumpling and uncrumpling the paper for about a half an hour before going at it, essentially breaking it down to what appeared to be a semi fuzzy limp mess before hitting it with sparks.
No Joy...

After that failed, I started shredding the mess into strips and wound them together lightly.
No luck...

So I shredded a napkin and mixed it into the tinder bundle.
Nope...

Then I pulled a bunch of fuzz off my cotton socks and put the resulting fuzzball in the middle of bundle.
After a few strikes that landed sparks in the cotton I was able to blow the mess to flame. (Thanks to Les Stroud for that tip in the Georgia Swamp ep. of Survivorman)

I was laying a lot of sparks down on the paper tinder bundles with no luck at all, minus a few red glows that would never amount to enough to catch, with so many strikes off of the MagFire that I could literally shake the bundle and a ton of black spark remnants would fall out, which may have been the wrong thing to do.

I've used the very same MagFire to light everything from prepared tabs such as Tinderquick and cotton and Vaseline balls to gathered natural materials, from drier lint to wood shavings and fire sticks, and from charcoal from a previous fire and char cloth to wood punk, always with eventual success (when dry), but paper... Ugh... I don't know what's wrong with my methodology there... Perhaps I didn?t try long enough, but after about an hour and a half or more I was so frustrated and annoyed with the whole thing I cheated an added the cotton lint from my socks to the bundle.

The one exception to my paper tests came later when I ran across a sheet of paper at an art supply store that was supposed to be used to make mattes for framing pictures and other projects. You could actually see the long fibers in that paper.

If anyone has some suggestions on how to use paper as tinder I would love to hear them.

It should be noted that I've never tried using a magnesium bar and striker setup to try to light paper. That might work fairly easily. That's a guess of course. <img src="/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />