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Artificial intelligence (AI) and generative chatbots are challenging teachers to rethink writing tasks and processes, and how to foster students’ competence and independence as writers. The chatbot Sokrates is an elementary school-adapted version of ChatGPT.[1] Like its Greek namesake, Sokrates is trained to ask questions that encourage reflection on the given conversational topic. In this study, we investigate whether the chatbot is suitable for providing students with writing support in the pre-writing phase of a writing assignment on fairy tales in 5th grade. Fairy tales are formulaic stories that consist of several elements that were also recognizable in the chats, and we therefore ask: What story elements are included in Sokrates’ questions to the students and how does the chatbot serve as a writing assistant? The study is based on a research project in which students engaged in a 30-minute written chat with Sokrates to initiate their fairy tales. We analyzed six of these chats based on an analysis scheme with eight categories that we considered central to the students' story development: setting, protagonist, goal, antagonist, complication, solution, coherence, and genre features. The analyses showed that the interaction between the chatbot and students facilitated content generation, character development, and plot structuring, but that the chatbot asked few genre-specific questions. In addition, the quality of the feedback provided by the chatbot varied regardless of the students’ formulation skills. Some of the chats show that the chatbot dominated and dictated the students’ narratives, and that this co-creation was not always appropriate or well-received. The findings are discussed in the context of didactic research on writing and represent an important digital-didactic contribution to the emerging research field of AI-assisted writing in elementary schools. [1] The chatbot was developed at Randabergskolen (ai.randabergskolen.no).