The whole world is story mad. Pundits invoke the political “narrative”; passing news items become breathless podcasts; restaurant menus portentously recount “Our Story.” In the corporate world, storytelling has become a résumé bullet point. Microsoft, which generally eschews the smarmy job titles issued by tech rivals, has employed a “chief storyteller,” and for $497, an online course will teach you “the MOST important skill in the 21st century.”

Screenwriters have long mined Aristotle’s “Poetics” for craft tips, but at last someone has thought to update it for the civilian raconteur. “How to Tell a Story: An Ancient Guide to the Art of Storytelling for Writers and Readers,” by Pepperdine professor Philip Freeman, is a lively new translation geared for maximum utility, featuring a short introduction, pithy but invented section titles (“A Brief Note on Bad Plots”) and basic endnotes.

Aristotle’s original text comprised close studies of both tragedy and comedy, with asides on the “Iliad,” “Odyssey” and other examples of epic poetry (a form he judged inferior to tragedy). The section on comedy has sadly been lost, but the extant half contains, among much else, Aristotle’s famous definition of tragedy. It is a genre, he writes, intended to elicit pity and fear, and thereby produce a (somewhat mysterious) catharsis.

Plot is the most important component of a good story, he continues; a story has a right size, neither too long nor too short; and every story has a beginning, middle and end. Tragedy depicts characters who are better than we are—but not so much as to be unrelatable—whereas comedy is about those worse than we are. This definition would exclude comedies featuring lovable naifs such as Buster Keaton; it’s not always easy to tell when Aristotle is asserting his own taste and when he’s simply being historically blinkered.

The how-to framing isn’t an imposition by Mr. Freeman, to be clear. Written in the fourth century B.C., the “Poetics” was meant to be prescriptive as well as analytical: This works best, Aristotle says repeatedly, for these reasons, with his characteristically empirical approach. (For a project on government, he and his students analyzed the constitutions of 158 different states, and his zoological studies were accurate enough to impress Darwin.) He supports his arguments by citing not only particular authors and plays but even individual verses—which means that it helps for readers to be familiar with works such as Euripides’ “Medea” and Aeschylus’ “Oresteia.”

Certainly the attraction of the “Poetics” isn’t the prose. The text, like all of Aristotle’s surviving works, is most likely some version of lecture notes. Transitions and conclusions are omitted in some places, repeated in others, perhaps reflecting the serial revisions of a practicing teacher. The style is always plain and often abrupt. Reading Aristotle, the 18th-century poet Thomas Gray wrote, is like eating “chopped hay.”

Mr. Freeman does his best to find some still-sharp needles in the stack. “A plot should be structured,” Aristotle urges, “so that if any of its episodes were rearranged or removed, the whole story would be disturbed and dislocated.” A good tragedy, he stresses, will inspire fear and pity even with a simple summary of its events; acting and staging are secondary. A carefully devised plot, that is, is almost mechanically effective, regardless of style (or lack thereof).

Even the lesson that every story has a beginning, middle and end is a surprisingly useful one. People often mistake a topic for a story, when the trick is to find the figure in the marble block. As Aristotle notes (in Mr. Freeman’s version), “In spite of what some people think, a plot is not unified because it is about a single person.” Selection and omission are vital. As is due proportion: For a story to be pleasing, Aristotle says, we must be able to “take in the whole thing all at once” as we move through its parts.

Such rule-making invites objections. Is it really the case that plausibility is all, that “stories shouldn’t contain any unbelievable parts”? Are the greatest stories really about someone “better” than we are? The stories we tell today may not be, but thinking in those terms teaches you to consider the essential question of how your audience will judge your protagonist. And the very violation of Aristotle’s principles makes “messy” shaggy-dog narratives such as “Tristram Shandy” and stream-of-consciousness novels seem perversely thrilling.

Mr. Freeman works hard to soften Aristotle’s aridities for modern readers. “Hopefully everyone already knows what music is,” his Aristotle says, like a professor deadpanning to a crowd of undergrads. In the section on phonetics and grammar—all but irrelevant if the story you’re telling isn’t in Ancient Greek—appears the chipper section title “The Wonderful Versatility of Nouns.” This translation can be clumsy, however. Aristotle’s intriguing claim that using metaphor well “is a sign of genius” (euphuias semeion), for example, is redundantly rendered as “It is quite simply a natural talent for those who have it.”

This “if you got it, you got it” shrug is hardly a minor point, because Aristotle also holds that the most important element of style is to “be good at metaphor.” One stimulating way to think about the “Poetics,” then, is as not only a book of rules but an early entry in an age-old argument: Can writing be taught at all?

—Mr. Farrington is a former editor at Harper’s magazine and The Wall Street Journal.