You read a story that floors you, and you feel this compulsion to figure out why it floors you, to recreate that feeling for yourself, to make the story and yourself and your own craft better.

Yes, absolutely! I've spent a lot of time trying to "reverse-engineer" stories and learn their inner workings. This sentence took my breath away, but why? Was it the sentence itself, or the context of the rest of the paragraph? If you reworded it this way or that way, how would the effect change? The craft of writing is endlessly fascinating to me.

Good luck on the fic! *waves pompoms*