1. A method comprising: receiving a request from a viewing user of a social networking system for a timeline view presenting one or more stories in a chronological order based on a time associated with each of the one or more stories; identifying a story generator maintained by the social networking system and associated with the timeline view; accessing one or more items of narrative data maintained by the social networking system and related to the viewing user; filtering the narrative data based on one or more time periods based on characteristics of the story generator associated with the timeline view; selecting one or more items of narrative data from the filtered narrative data based on a relevance of the narrative data to the viewing user; generating one or more timeline units from the selected one or more items of narrative data using the story generator associated with the timeline view; generating an affinity score for each of the one or more timeline units, each affinity score comprises a measure of the relevance of a timeline unit to the viewing user; generating a ranking of the one or more timeline units based on the affinity scores; selecting one or more timeline units based at least in part on the ranking; and sending the timeline view comprising displayable representations of the selected timeline units in an order based on time periods associated with each of the selected timeline units to the client device for display to the viewing user.