Just read a bunch of books on interviewing: Effective Interviewing & Interrogation Techniques, Interviews That Work, The Active Interview, Creative Interviewing, and Investigative Interviewing. Condensing their ideas yields the following:

Decide what you want from the interview after you've done some initial research. Do further research, trying to put yourself in their shoes, looking for social assumptions you might not have in common. This will help you anticipate what questions they will be able to answer. The goal is to speak for 5% or less of the interview; good questions will ask for an explanation, chronology, or example; bad questions are:

  1. Multi-part or lengthy
  2. Contain Simultaneous opposites (compare and contrast, pros and cons, etc.)
  3. Unfocused (so, how has life been?)
  4. Ones that begin with an apology
  5. Cliches (how's the weather?)
  6. Leading
  7. Yes/No answerable
  8. Hammer on something they left out.
The most interesting read was Effective Interviewing & Interrogation Techniques, as it covered a great deal about telling the truth and lying: psycho-physiological analysis, question formulation, non-verbal behavior analysis, and neurolinguistics.

Truth isLying is
rich in details
first person singular, past tense
proper introduction of people
uses possessive pronoun
no gaps in time
appropriate emotions
will deny crime before being asked
story flow jives
truthful stories' content is 20% before, 50% during, 30% after 		lack of details
deviates from first person singular, past tense
improper introduction of victim "She...."
lack of possessive "the waitress...."
missing time
no emotions
only denies when directly questioned
story flow disjointed

But, even better, it answered a question I've been trying to answer for a long time, namely, how can you ascertain someone's preferred learning modality? The answer comes via neurolinguistics, if you ask a question which causes someone to reflect and think (but not to remember a sound, picture, or feeling), they will show their primary learning modality by where their eyes look:

Direction of gazePreferred Learning Modality
UpVisual
SidewaysAudio
DownKinesthetic

And finally, it appears that Studs Terkel was a great interviewer, several of the books mentioned him with almost god-like reverence.