I myself do write, and some of what I write is fairly complex fiction somewhere between fantasy and science fiction. When I first began to conceive of a world of my own imaginative creation (well over 40 years ago), I know that I was heavily influenced by both Tolkien and Anne McCaffrey. My early attempts were quite abysmal, but as time went on and I and my writing matured, things improved. Part of the improvement I know I can gratefully acknowledge as having come from my relationship with my friend and mentor Katherine Kurtz (who penned the Chronicles of the Deryni). What is possibly the most valuable piece of advice she gave me was that when an author creates a "new world," they must know that world in as exacting a detail as possible. What shows up in the actual books may be only a comparative tip of the iceberg, but if you don't know all there is to know about the world you are inventing, your lack of knowledge will be picked up by the readers, usually as inconsistencies, contradictions, or illogical events or behaviors. I found she's quite right. And because of that, an author does tend to get drawn into the world they are inventing. It is an immensely complex work of art, and as you develop one part of it, other parts suggest themselves; backstory grows and becomes more intricate as events of the present and future are mapped out. When you determine that a certain character is to do something, you wonder about their motivation, and in determining their motivation, you begin to build their past history, which grows into a family tree, with other people who came from other places and did things in their own rights. As cities are imagined, the societies that inhabit them is created, and given histories of their own. The process of imagining one thing pulls you into imagining another, and another, and another.
Tolkien, I think, rather neatly summed up much of the process early in LotR:
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"Certainly it reminds me very much of Bilbo in the last years, before he went away. He used to often say that there was only one Road; that it was like a great river: its springs were at every doorstep, and every path was its tributary. 'It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door,' he used to say. 'You step into the Road, and if you don't keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to."
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That, in my experience, is very much like the process of inventing your own world, in which your characters live and have adventures. It draws you in, and quite often, it sweeps you along in the current of your own imagination unleashed. It's often a difficult process, but it can be exhilarating as well.
Just my experience, of course.
