Closing the JOptionPane

I've run into another problem, which is..if the user expands one of the options, a JOptionPane pops up asking them a question. For example, the easiest one says "Name one of the people in the Golden Trio." Because it is in a JOptionPane, they have the option of either closing it or pressing 'Cancel.' The program, takes this as a "null" value for the string. So it has nullPointerException every time it does something like that.

Another thing I can do is create a new frame asking them the question and then have them enter it in a JTextField, and pop up a JOptionPane of that JTextField is empty.