When I started writing my paper on opium I assumed it would be very straightforward - Drugs are bad, opium makes heroin, etc. As I did my research, though, I discovered things about the opium plant and its affects that were much more complicated and less black and white than my original "drugs are bad" idea. When I started searching I would just use "opium" as the keyword and get a lot of articles about the refinement process, stats on the number of users of heroin, general information on heroin. When I started using the phrase " problems with opium" (which was, after n all, the topic of the paper) I started getting more diverse articles and things that I had never heard of before. I guess I kind of stumbled onto the information that would eventually become the basis for my paper, that is, opium and terrorism and their link and co-dependence. The hardest part of writing the paper was deciding what to have prepared beforehand - what sources I should have ready, what parts of those sources would be the most relevent, and which sources and facts would be the most persuasive in convincing an audience of the severity and importance of my problem. I also wanted to find a newer perspective to use to address the problem. I didn't want to have the same paper as anyone else, so that posed a challenge as well.