There are a few ... details ... to take care of correctly to get that spark into a flame.
Use enough charcloth or tinder fungus. Too many people try to get by with too little of either, and they run out of heat before their tinder material catches fire.
Use a big enough "bird's nest" of tinder. Again, don't skimp. Have enough material to wrap around your spark, and have it thick enough to capture most of the heat from your char/fungus. You need to transfer the heat from your char/fungus to your tinder bundle - to get the individual bits hot enough to flame up and burn.
Have your tinder bundle material as dry as you can get! Otherwise the material soaks up a bunch of your heat to dry out, before it can start heating up enough to flame/burn.
Don't blow on your ember/spark too much in your tinder bundle or bird's nest. Blowing too hard will burn up your spark catching material too fast. And it will blow a lot of your heat out through the back of your tinder bundle, and also cool other parts of your tinder. It's a balancing act that needs to be learned as you go.
Don't RUSH the process. If you have enough char/fungus and a large enough tinder bundle, you do have a comfortable amount of time to work with. So speed would only be required if you were in some sort of competition.
Watch someone else - in person. It really does help seeing it done a time or three in person.
You can light a candle directly with either charclothe or tinder fungus, but it is tricky - and takes practice. To do it, take a large piece of charclothe and roll it up into a tight roll. Then catch your spark on the end of it. Now press that glowing end to your candle wick and start to blow on it. You need to have your glowing charclothe heat up enough to start to melt some of the wax - and get it hot enough to then vaporize that wax. When it starts to vaporize some of the wax, it will then be hot enough to flame up. It's tricky, but can be done. It does work a little easier if you use a Tinder Tube (a metal tube with a cotton/linen cord through it - or rolled up cotton cloth to form a cord). Push some of the rope out a ways from your tinder tube, catch your spark in the pre-charred end, press that end to your candle, and start to gently blow on it. And it will also then heat up and start to melt/vaporize some of that wax until it's hot enough to flame up.
As I said, tricky but possible.
It is much easier to have those "sulfer sticks". And they are very historically correct - going back to Roman times. To make them, you carefully melt a little sulfer, and then dip the end of some slivers of wood into it. This will leave a little bit on the end. If you then touch that sulfer to your smoldering char/fungus (or even a coal from your campfire), it will then flame up kind of like a modern stick match. But they need to be touched to some sort of ember to catch fire.
Just some humble thoughts to share. Take them as such.
Mikey - yee ol' grumpy blacksmith out in the Hinterlands
